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Tuesday, October 17, 2006

HC+T Update: October 2006

HC+T Update
October 2006

A Review of Edelman’s Latest Social Media Blunder
Apple’s Anonymous Employees
A Blow to “Edge” Content
Content, Technology, and Podcasts
Intel Blogs to the IT Community
Five Stops Left on the “Wired World” Tour
The Need for Speed in Clearing Blog Comments
Bars are Dead
Caribou Coffee Capitalizes on Coupons
Site of the month
HC+T update
Boilerplate and subscription information

Sorry about September! Work was just overwhelming and I simply ran out of time to get an issue of HC+T Update out the door. But I’m back and I’ll do my best not to miss another issue.

As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog over the past month. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. A Review of Edelman’s Latest Social Media Blunder

The first inkling I had that Edelman PR had stumbled again in its social media efforts on behalf of client WalMart came early when an email containing a copy of the MediaPost story that outlined the situation. In short order, several other colleagues emailed me the story, which I subsequently reported in an installment of my podcast, “For Immediate Release” (http://www.forimmediaterelease.biz) . After that, the blogosphere erputed. A Technorati search on some key words relating to the story reveals about 260 posts on the topic.

The one source we didn’t hear from—at least, not until several days had gone by—was Edelman.

In case you missed the story, a blog ostensibly authored by a couple traveling across America in their RV and spending nights parked in WalMart parking lots turned out to be a fake blog, the brainchild of WalMart’s PR counselors at Edelman. While fake blogs (and other fake social media) are nothing new, it’s dismaying to see it emerge from Edelman, which has some of the smarter new-media people on its staff (Phil Gomes, Michael Wiley, Steve Rubel and more), and which touts itself as the PR firm that truly gets social media. This is the third time (as Todd Defren noted in his post) that Edelman has botched the whole social media thing on WalMart’s behalf.

Those smart PR folks working for Edelman are among the members of the PR community who advocate participation in the conversation. Some of them have been brutal when, to their way of thinking, somebody else fails to understand what it means to be engage in the conversation. So where is Edelman in this particular conversation? Missing in action. As dismaying as this latest misstep is, it’s even more dismaying to see Edelman’s high-powered social media experts failing to walk the talk. Nothing from Richard in his vaunted 6 a.m. blog. Nothing from Steve, who blogs at the pinnacle of PR’s A-list. Nothing from anybody (based on a Technorati search and a survey of the Edelman blogs).

Then, after days of criticism, Richard Edelman posted a very brief item to his blog, as did Steve Rubel. To his great credit, Edelman apologized, acknowledged that the tactic was wrong, and indicated the company is going through an education process. He replied to comments posted to his item, and has even posted a comment among those left to my original post on my blog.

Edelman has also noted that the company refrained from comment until all the facts were in; Steve Rubel made the same point.

Comments posted to both Rubel’s and Edelman’s blogs have run the gamut from praise for admitting the mistake to questions about what took so long to outright dismissal and an assumption that the same behavior is bound to repeat itself. An optimist, I’m willing to give Edelman the benefit of the doubt and assume that, after three conecutive social media blunders on the WalMart account, they’ll undergo some serious introspection and establish some processes and guidelines. I think it takes guts to admit you’ve made a mistake and even more to apologize. A lot of CEOs would never take that step no matter how egregious their acts.

The problem I still have is with how long it took to begin participating in the conversation. I sympathize with Edelman’s desire to get all the facts, but this was a genuine, bona fide, reputation-damaging crisis. As the title of Gerald Baron’s excellent crisis communication book informs us, “Now is Too Late.” Nobody should know this better, as it relates to social media, than a PR agency that promotes and implements social media solutions (not to mention provides crisis communication counsel). It should have taken hours, not days, to ascertain the facts in order to address the crisis quickly. I would hope fast response is another issue Edelman is addressing with his employees. Even “We’re listening and looking into this and will let you know what’s going on once we have the facts” would have been better than the deafening silence.

At the same time, of course, I do understand that the cobbler’s children have no shoes.

Another curiosity arises from Edelman’s admission —- he calls the blog “the cross-country tour that Edelman designed for Working Families for WalMart.” This seems to contradict assertions made in the final post that appears on the blog itself, which insists that the tour was the blogger’s idea: “I called my brother, who works at Edelman and whose clients include Working Families for Wal-Mart, in order to find out if we’d be allowed to talk to people and take pictures in Wal-Mart parking lots. As a freelance writer, I’ve learned over the years that it’s always better to ask about stuff like that in advance. They didn’t just give us permission. They said they would even sponsor the trip!”

Go read the post for yourself to see how it squares with the admission that the tour was designed by Edelman. From what we’ve learned based on Edelman’s and Rubel’s posts, this could be true, semi-true, or completely untrue. We just don’t know.

So props to Richard Edelman for the admisison and the mea culpa. Best of luck to his company in making sure they get it right in the future. And sincere hopes that more answers to the many lingering questions get answered now that the company and its representatives have started engaging in the conversation.

2. Apple’s Anonymous Employees

An employee of Apple Computers has taken “Naked Conversations” author Shel Israel up on his offer to join a conversation about Apple’s customer service. The employee, however, has opted to do so anonymously.

The conversation began after Shel (my friend and namesake) posted an item to the Naked Conversations blog about the diminishing likelihood that he’ll buy a Mac. His decision was prompted partly by Lenovo’s response to a customer service issue. Shel wrote:

“I want to do business with companies who will be there for me when their products let me down. I just got a case of someone I trust getting helped by Lenovo and screwed by Apple. That’s all I need to know to decide. BTW, anyone from Apple Computer wishing to join this conversation is free to do so.”

The response was an engaging and smart one:

“I think the broader issue is how we evolve large company support organisations where typically the relationship is managed by a junior member of staff and arbitrated by fixed processes? How do we build two-way conversations and trusted relationships? The organisation that cracks this first will have innovation far more valuable than any product based innovation!”

The author, though, called himself “masked,” which is also his blogging moniker —- he authors ”The Masked Blogger“ (which is also where he responded in more detail to Shel’s post). Shel replied by asking why he should trust a company whose employees have to mask their identities, to which masked said he, too, was uncomfortable with anonmity:

“Here’s the dilemma: don’t participate in the conversation, participate transparently with a fear that the income to support my family could be at risk, orparticipate with anonymity.

“Is the bigger question, as you point out, why don’t some employers trust their staff to join and add value to the conversation?

“My thoughts have been to ‘extend the membrane’ from the inside with the hope of demonstrating value and effecting a change in approach.

“Am I misguided on this ... is transparency and authenticity a prerequisite?

“I sense I’m not alone with this dilemma. I will post further on this issue as I think it is important to many of us. What is do you think? I’d be very interested if this issue resonates with any of your constituency.”

Credit to mask for his (or her) willingness to participate. And I certainly understand and support the rationale for remaining anonymous. However, you have to wonder how much influence mask can take back to the organization based on the conversation if Apple doesn’t support employees engaging with customers. Microsoft, Sun, and other companies do, and their images are being rehabilitated, wile Apple’s is sinking.

And mask is also right in his assumption that employees at many other companies that have not figured out (or don’t care) that business has evolved into partnerships with customers and that the marketplace is, as the Cluetrain Manifesto authors observed, a conversation.

3. A Blow to “Edge” Content

Long before there was Edgio, del.icio.us, or Technorati Kitchen, Google recognized the notion of content on the edge and the power of a website to aggregate content that already exists in other places.

Edgeio clarified the concept with its use of blog tags for classified ads. Rather than a seller listing an ad on a site like Craig’s List or eBay, he would simply run the item on his own blog and tag it in such a way that Edgeio could find it. Edgeio would list all the classifieds it had found, sucking those items in from the sites where they resided.

Google News has been doing roughly the same thing for years. The principle is the same: If news content resides on news sites, it should be a simple matter to aggregate that content and make it available in aggregate based on the interests of the reader.

On September 18, a Belgian court dealt a blow to Google News and perhaps to anybody thinking of aggregating content without explicit permission. The court was responding to a complaing filed by Copiepresse, which handles copyright issues for the German and Belgian-French press. The court ordered Google to stop reproducing articles from those publications in its Belgian sites.

Failure to coply will cost Google US $1.3 million per day.

News.com quoted Copiepresse General Secretary Margaret Boribon: “We are asking for Google to pay and seek our authorization to use our content…Google sells advertising and makes money on our content.”

Google does, indeed, make money with advertising on Google News, but seeing a full story requires readers to click through to the newspaper’s site. As you can see from the image below—of a Google News search on Copiepresse—only the first few words of the story appear, followed by the link to the media outlet’s site.

So Google is driving traffic to these newspapers, traffic from readers who would likely never find those newspapers to begin with. As my mother would put it, Copiepresse is cutting off its nose to spite its face.

But worse, many organizations thinking about how to offer services that leverage edge content may now think twice. That’s a shame.

4. Content, Technology, and Podcasts

I have been hearing and reading a lot of communicators lately proclaiming that, in podcasting, content is king. While I agree wholeheartedly, I’d like to respectfully disagree.

If that sounds like an incongruous statement, indeed, it is. So let me explain the incongruity.

Content is king. Nobody is going to listen to a podcast with content that sucks. To put a finer point on it, nobody will listen to a podcast with content that doesn’t appeal to them. So solid content rocks.

The problem is that lousy implementation of the technologies that underlie podcasting will keep many listeners from ever even getting to the content. A couple examples:

I subscribe to several podcasts I never hear. That’s because they do not include an album title in the ID3 tags, which means these podcasts do not get classified into a playlist. I access my podcasts via the iPod playlist feature. If a playlist for that podcast doesn’t exist, I don’t know it’s there. Hence, great content gathers dust in the deep recesses of the iPod’s and iTunes’ file structure.

Then there are those podcasts where audio levels are not adjusted. A simple normalization action before exporting to MP3 would solve this problem, but instead, I’m forced to crank the volume to max in order to hear an audio comment, then when the host comes back, my eardrums are shattered as the volume returns to its previous higher level. I simply give up on many of these shows as being unlistenable, even though the content is terrific.

So in our haste to proclaim content the be-all and end-all of podcasting, let’s not understate the importance of using the technology correctly.

5. Intel Blogs to the IT Community

I got weary a long time ago of posts announcing companies that have started blogging, but Robert Scoble’s post alerting me that Intel is blogging was intriguing enough to point to. The blog, IT@Intel, “features several of Intel’s top IT leaders, who share their perspectives and invite discussion on the issues they and other IT managers are facing today.” according to the blog’s “About” page; “The blog offers an “inside look” at Intel’s IT operations and provides opportunities for you to exchange ideas directly with the IT experts who keep Intel’s business running and growing.”

The blog will be governed by a set of principles, including these about comments:

We will post comments, except for spam and remarks that are off-topic, denigrating or offensive
We will reply to comments promptly, when appropriate
The initial posts are brief introductions from the bloggers who will contribute to IT@Intel, and commenting is light, but the blog is, after all, brand-spanking new. It’s intriguing that the blog launches
during the company’s painful and sizable layoffs, but on the other hand, more direct engagement with constituents may reflect the company’s leaner, smarter attitude. I’m sure there will be those
who will tell Intel everything that’s wrong with the blog, but credit to Intel diving in, especially during a time when it must seem easier to just stay below the radar.

Disclosure: Intel has been one of my clients off and on over the last couple years.

6. Five Stops Left On The Wired World Tour
The first session of “Connecting with the Wired World,” held last week in San Francisco, went great! There are five stops left, so there’s plenty of time to register. In this workshop, I’ll cover how to…

Reach your many and varied audiences through better and smarter online writing techniques
Develop audio, video and animated content that will engage your audiences as never beforeóand reach new ones
Monitor what customers, competitors, employees, activists and others are saying about you online and in the blogosphereóand be ready to influence the discussion
Sell the concepts of blogs, podcasting and other social media tools to a management skeptical of new tools and technologies
Engage your audiences in an online conversationóand mitigate the risks inherent in participatory communications

I’ll relate this to intranets, blogs, wikis, social media sites, social bookmarking and tagging, citizen and open-source media, and RSS.

Here’s the remaining lineup:

10/23-24: New York
10/26-27: Washington, DC
10/30-31: Chicago
11/02-03: Atlanta
11/13-14: Toronto, ONT, Canada

Get the details and register online at http://snipurl.com/ragan_connect.

7. The Need for Speed in Clearing Blog Comments

There is an expectation in the blogosphere -— and not an unreasonable one -— that bloggers will check their blogs frequently and clear out their comment moderation queues quickly in order to keep the dialogue fresh and current. As businesses expand their presence in the blogosphere, they appear to be doing so at corporate speeds, not blog speeds. That’s a mistake. The blogosphere will not adapt to the pace of business.

Two recent incidents show the hazards associated with the usual business response times. First, Direct2Dell, the Dell Computers blog, has been criticized for withholding negative posts and getting some information up to the blog—such as the battery recall—concurrent with the announcement through normal channels. More recently, McDonald’s has taken heat for not clearing negative comments to its Open for Discussion blog that focuses on corporate social responsibility. A post on the blog responded to crticism aimed at the company for including a HumVee toy as a Happy Meal item, part of a promotion with Hummer maker GM. Comments appeared a day later.

In both cases, the desired items and comments eventually appeared. But did they appear in response to blogger outrage decrying apparent corporate censorship?

I don’t know the answer for certain, but having spent 15 years working for Fortune 500 companies, I suspect not. My guess is that nobody is dedicated 100% full-time to these blogs, and clearing moderation queues is something that is gotten around to when time permits and higher priority tasks have been completed. That’s just the way businesses try to handle these kinds of activities: “I know you’re already working full-time, but now we’d like you to manage our highly visible corporate blog, too. But don’t let your other responsibilities slide.”

It’s easy to see why corporations wouldn’t want to dedicate a full salary, benefits, and other associated costs to an employee who will do nothing but blog. (Although it’s not unheard of, either, as in the case of Stonyfield Farms.) But when a business is unable to respond quickly enough to meet the minimum requirements that have emerged as a standard for responding in the blogosphere, the company’s blog could wind up doing more harm than good.

Of course, even among us individual bloggers, it’s not always possible to respond as quickly as we’d like. However, companies are not individuals. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect a company that has started a blog to commit the resources to maintain it, which includes reviewing comments in the moderation queue in a timely manner.

For those who are counseling their companies and clients to blog, it’s important to explain the commitment as well as the rationale. If the organization isn’t willing to make that commitment, an alternative means of ensuring comments are addressed effectively are not available, it’s probably better to hold off on blogging until the organization grasps the benefits in terms of the expense of time and resources. It’s just not worth it having high-profile bloggers lambaste you for censorship when you really just haven’t had the time to get to it.

8. Bars are Dead

Why drag yourself out to a bar when you can sit all by yourself at your desk blogging with a Scotch in hand?

Robert Scoble has predicted the death of big conferences. Now, I like Robert and agree with most of what he says, but I have to take issue with this one. In his post, he points out that he told 15 people at a small blogger conference about his departure from Microsoft. Some of those folks blogged the news, leading to somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million impressions. Says Robert:

“So, why does anyone need to go to a big conference to hear the news again? Simple: you don’t. It’s not worth doing. Not when a CEO can write a blog, get more people to visit it in 36 hours than would probably visit his booth at the Detroit Auto Show. How do you get news out? Invite a blogger over for lunch. It doesn’t matter who the blogger is. If the news is interesting it’ll spread and spread fast.”

I have no issue with Robert’s argument; it’s absolutely true. The problem is that conferences are about a whole lot more than disseminating news. I wouldn’t go to the Detroit Auto Show to hear a CEO make an announcement. I’d go to see and sit in the cars. Not a picture. Not a virtual car in Second Life. I want to see 3,000 pounds of metal, plastic, chrome and rubber. I want to sit in the front seat and wrap my hands around the steering wheel and inhale that new car smell.

I go to the IABC conference to interact with other people, both in sessions and in bars and restaurants. I know I can do that online, but there’s something a whole lot more satisfying about a face-to-face experience. That’s why so many of us (including Robert) host geek dinners when we’re traveling. There’ll be a big such dinner at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo where I’m looking forward to finally meeting people like Heidi Miller, John Wall, Terry Fallis, and a host of others (not to mention renewing friendships with people I’ve met before like C.C. Chapman and Rob Safuto).

I recall one communication conference at which the speaker urged the audience to not forsake face-to-face as a tool for communication, noting that we’re hardwired from prehistoric times to communicate that way. “Any communication that is not face-to-face,” he said, “is a corruption of face-to-face communication.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think blogs and other social media rock and Robert is absolutely right about the way news can get out in this era of social computing. But in a blog posting you lose facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, and all those other non-verbal cues that drive most of our reaction to a message. That’s what the speaker meant about corruption of face-to-face communication. (Yes, a video can address a lot of that, but let’s face it, only a handful of the people with whom you’d want to interact will produce and post a video, and then it doesn’t allow for real-time engagement.)

Big conferences, then, will continue to thrive—so we can put hands on the products and services being touted there and so we can interact with real people in the physical world. Or, as Robert Bruce put it in a comment to Scoble’s blog, “Having no conferences will prevent me from having realtime conversations with people who I can’t get an email or blog response from because you are all too busy with your A, B or C lister rankings!”

9. Caribou Coffee Capitalizes on Coupons

Talk about a smart move. Caribou Coffee has turned a Starbucks gaffe into an opportunity to promote itself.

In case you missed the story, Starbucks hastily canceled a promotion it had launched to get people to try its iced coffees. A coupon for a free iced coffee was linked to an email Starbucks sent to employees to share with friends and family in the Southeast. How Starbucks didn’t see this email going viral is beyond me, but they didn’t. The coupon spread and counterfeit versions appeared. Starbucks pulled the plug, earning them “loser of the week” designation on Joseph Jaffe’s Across the Sound new marketing podcast.

Most marketers would kill for a promotion to go viral like that. Most marketers would swallow the cost of all those drinks they hadn’t planned to give away in order to get that many people into their stores to try an iced coffee…and maybe get them to come back again and again to buy more.

Among those who see the value of such a giveaway are the folks at Caribou Coffee, who recognized the potential in Starbucks’ mistake to serve its own interest. The company quickly communicated that it would accept those coupons -— but for only this Friday from noon to close of business and only while supplies—for a medium-sized cold-pressed iced coffee, iced Americano, or iced tea. The same offer went out to subscribers to Caribou’s email mailing list.

Caribou’s CEO Michael Coles, quoted in a Denver Post article, said, “We want to introduce gourmet coffee lovers to a great new product, Cold Press iced coffee.”

When CC Chapman passed this story along to me, he noted he’d never heard of Caribou Coffee. (I have—they’re all over Washington, DC. It was a Caribou Coffee barista who told me that light roast has more caffeine than dark roast, leading me to switch. I love caffeine.) I bet CC isn’t the only person who’s heard of Caribou now. Caribou’s quick thinking is Starbucks’ loss.

This isn’t the first time Caribou has trumped Starbucks. The ubiquitous Starbucks offers WiFi, but only to those with a T*Mobile WiFi account. Late last month, Caribou announced free WiFi for its customers (PDF of press release). Smart marketing like that could result in some of Starbucks sales migrating over to Caribou.

10. Sites of the Month

I just got an invitation to participate in the beta for Slideshare, which I can best describe as YouTube for PowerPoint. The idea is to upload a PPT presentation, which is converted into a Flash format and shared on the site. You can tag your presentations to make them discoverable via search. And the code is available to either embed or link to the presentation within your own blog or website.

The site emulates YouTube in other ways. Each presentation you select comes with links to similar presentations. You can comment on presentations (although I don’t see a voting option yet). Google ads run down the right-hand side of the page.

I did a presentation in Riverside, California for the Inland Empire chapter of PRSA and posted the PowerPoint to SlideShare; you can see it on my blog at http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/weblog/slideshare_presentation/.

http://www.slideshare.net

Todd Defren from SHIFT Communications announces on his blog today the availability of PRX Builder, a tool that lets you build a social media news release without having to figure out all that dicey formatting. PRNewswire charges $395 for a web-only release using the tool.

http://www.prxbuilder.com/default.aspx

11. HC+T update

I’ll present a session with Thornley-Fallis’s Terry Fallis in Toronto next month on podcasting.
In November, I’ll make two presentations in Atlanta, one to a healthcare conference, the other to a conference on travel. Both sessions look at social media.
As you may have heard, I’m leaving the adventure of self-employment and returning to the world of the working. I’m joining a startup communications firm along with Joseph Jaffe, Neville Hobson, C.C. Chapman, and a cast of other talented and new media-focused communicators. More to come next month—or just listen to “For Immediate Release,” where the information is being communicated first. Don’t worry, though; this newsletter will continue, and I will remain available for speaking and training engagements.

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Posted by Shel on 10/17 at 02:35 PM
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Saturday, August 26, 2006

HC+T Update: August 2006

HC+T Update
August 2006

New Webinar Begins Today
Online Video Will Continue to Grow
Sweeping Statements
Brits Rate Mainstream Media More Trustworthy
Participate in a Healthcare Blogging Survey
My Road Tour is Getting Closer
More Reasons to Take Second Life Seriously
Yahoo! Launches a Corporate Blog
Another Lesson on Corporate Blogging
Site of the month
HC+T update
Boilerplate and subscription information

New Webinar Begins Today

The new fundamentals of employee communications

A new Webinar featuring Shel Holtz, ABC
Five consecutive Mondays, beginning Monday, August 28, 2006
$345 covers the entire five-week Webinar!
Registration: http://snipurl.com/ec_webinar

Most organizations haven’t awakened to it yet, but the fact is that the guidelines that governed employee communications a mere decade ago don’t work anymore. Seismic change has affected everything from the conduct of business in general to the models of organizational communication. To succeed in employee communications—that is, to produce tangible benefits for the organization—communicators need to grasp the new rules, the new dynamics, the new models that drive internal communication success. In this far-reaching five-week online Webinar, you’ll learn…

How the wall between internal and external communications has become porous, how the functions must work together, and the means by which you can ensure internal messaging drives your organization’s desired external perceptions
The roles of the CEO, executives, managers and supervisors in the communication process
The underpinnings of effective internal communications that can be tied directly to the company’s financial performance
How to balance authoritative company communications with the set of increasingly collaborative, grass roots-driven channels
How new communication tools like blogs and podcasts can fit into your communication mix without increasing the amount of work you have to do

... and a lot more!

Register by Aug. 30 to participate in this five-week workshop. The first lecture will be posted on Aug. 28. Subsequent lectures will be posted on Sept. 4, 11, 18 and 25.

During the webinar, you’ll benefit from comprehensive lectures, links to other online resources, downloadable handouts, and interaction with your instructor as well as other webinar participants. All this costs only $345—a fraction of what you’d spend on a similar session in a hotel meeting room—and you’ll never have to leave your desk.

Webinars are asynchronous—you participate when it’s convenient for you. A new text-based lecture is posted each Monday morning, but you can take advantage of it whenever you have the time.

Questions about the event? Contact Ragan Communications at 1.800.493.4867 or e-mail Shel Holtz directly at shel@holtz.com.

Online Video Will Continue to Grow

My first corporate job —- in the mid-1970s working in employee communications for ARCO -— was a revelation. After working in newspapers for a couple years with their limited resources, seeing the tools available to a Fortune 20 company was enough to make you drool. For example, ARCO had a complete video studio. Later, the studio was abandoned as it became easier to outsource video work. But now, as video becomes more and more common on the web, you have to wonder when companies will begin beefing up their in-house video production capabilities.

A study from In-Stat (reported by ClickZ Stats), indicates consumption of online video is just getting started. “Online Content Aggregators —- AOL, Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Apple -— Slowly Defining the Future of Television” suggests the global market for online content will grow by a factor of 10 to over 131 million homes by 2010. Demand for online video is actually driving broadband adoption, according to the study, which projects 413 million homes will have broadband by the end of the decade, compared to 194 million today. Nearly 13% of all broadband households are consuming professionally-produced video.

Businesses by and large consider online video optional, but it’s important to consider that a company’s website is part of the greater web environment. People who grow accustomed to finding video everywhere will wonder about antiquated corporate sites populated mostly by text and pictures. Of course, given the availability of low-cost video cameras and inexpensive computer-based editing applications, in-house studios won’t cost anywhere near what they did in 1977. Companies should be gearing up to make more of their content available as something to watch, which is easier that online reading anyway.

Sweeping Statements

I stumbled across a post from back in April that included a statement I had to re-read several times to make sure I had it right: “Most PR bloggers are rarely critical of the industry and are genuinely giddy about the power of blogging.” The post, from The Bivings Group’s Rita Desai, makes two sweeping statements in one sentence. I have problems with both of them, but mostly the first.

I don’t read every PR blog, but I read about 50 of them, and one of the things I like about them -— what keeps me coming back-—is the remarkable degree of candor most of them display in their criticism of the PR industry. Not every post, of course, but whenever there’s a reason to take a stand (such as a news report of an agency or practitioner breeching ethical standards), the PR blogosphere tends to speak with a strong voice. Some of the topics I recall addressed by PR bloggers, off the top of my head, include pay-for-placement, questionable uses of video news releases, astroturfing, spamming, sending news releases that contain no news, and introducing services the agency is unqualified to provide. There have been calls for more action by the associations that represent the profession and harsher consequences for unethical behavior. Heck, there’s even a blog from two PR practitioners that is dedicated to bad pitches! The fact is, the PR blogosphere is more critical of lax PR practices than just about any other venue I can think of.

The approach taken is generally constructive, since we all work in the industry and want to see it shine. We’re all passionate about communications or we wouldn’t be blogging about it. We’re looking for (and in may instances suggesting) solutions.

Not every PR blogger writes about these issues, nor is there any obligation to do so. A blog about PR measurement, for example, is not required to digress from its theme when someone in the profession behaves badly. But by and large, bloggers like Allan Jenkins, Neville Hobson, Paul Holmes and a host of others have been forthright in their criticisms. All of which leads me to ponder the danger of making sweeping statements without having actually studied the subject at hand. I don’t know Ms. Desai -— I presume she’s a fine practitioner -— but I have to wonder how many PR blogs she read, over what period of time, before making her claim.

The “giddy” bit bothers me less, but still, the word is defined as “having a reeling, lightheaded sensation; dizzy.” Yes, many of us are enthusiastic, but our enthuiasm is based on experience and research. Frankly, I experienced the same kind of dismissal when I enthused over message boards and email in the late 1980s, the web in the early 1990s, and instant messaging in the late 1990s. (I remember being in a meeting around 1991 and suggesting that every member of the board of the organization should have an email address; the response: “There goes Shel with his online crap again.”) I was hardly alone back in 1991, though, joined in the Casandra syndrome (able to see what’s coming but nobody will believe you) by people like Craig Jolley, Pete Shinbach, John Gerstner, Sheri Rosen, Charles Pizzo and others. I remember being told, “No company needs a website,” and “We will never have instant messaging in this company; it’s just another way for employees to waste time.”

Were we all “giddy” about the role online technology would play in communication? No; we were convinced, enhtusiastic, even evangelical, but always tempered with reason and research, and always counseling a strategic approach to the application of these tools. Of course, today everybody has email, every company has a website (or more than one) and half the workers in the US use instant messaging as a primarily work-related tool.

I’m sure I’m as guilty as anyone else of making sweeping statements, but after reading this one, I pledge to be more careful about it. I wouldn’t want to paint anyone with a brush based on a cursory review of facts that leaves an inaccurate picture on display that readers may assume was carefully researched and factually accurate.

Brits Rate Mainstream Media More Trustworthy

The BBC reports that respondents to a new study ranked traditional media —- TV and newspapers -— as far more trustworthy than websites and blogs. The study, from interactive marketing firm Telecom Express, queried 1,000 people on the percentage of information from different sources they found to be accurate. Television ranked highest, at 66%, followed by national, regional, and local newspapers, which scored 55%. Websites were seen as accurate by 36% and blogs by only 24%.

“This study scotches any idea that the British media is no longer valued by the populace,” according to a Telecom Express spokesman.

The study results reinforce two of my long-held beliefs. First, new media do not kill old media. The notion that blogs are replacements, rather than supplements, of traditional journalism is simply wrong. Second, these studies ask the wrong question. If a research firm asked me if I trust blogs, I’d respond as most of those in the Telecom Express study did: no. But if somebody asked me whether I trusted Jim Horton’s or Mike Manuel’s blog, I’d answer yes. I don’t know the authors of most blogs; with Technorati tracking 51.8 million blogs as of today, there’s no way the average person can pay attention to more than a handful; they can assess the accuracy and value of only a percentage of those.

But I know Mike and Jim, and I’ve read enough of some other bloggers whom I’ve never met to decide that I can believe what they’ve written, too.

Further, whether you trust blogs in general or not, they’re still breaking news right alongside traditional journalists—and in the UK, with one in four Internet users writing blogs—that’s a lot of potential for influence. The BBC report notes as an example that it was a blogger who revealed that Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott had stayed at a ranch owned by U.S. businessman Philip Anschutz.

Participate in a Healthcare Blogging Survey

Fard Johnmar, one of the clearest voices taking Jupiter research to task for its unwillingness to share its research methodology on a recent blogging report, is asking for help with a survey of his own. Johnmar works for Envision Solutions, which in conjunction with The Medical Blog Network has launched a comprehensive survey of the blogal healthcare blogging community.

“Taking the Puse of the Healthcare Blogosphere” is, according to an Envision press release, “the first systematic attempt to gather comprehensive opinion and demographic data from the global community of healthcare bloggers.” The survey is open from today through September 29 to individuals and organizations that dedicate a minimum of 30% of their blogging time to healthcare-related topics. Envision will release results in the late full beginning with a presentation at the Healthcare Blogging Summit 2006, set for December 11 in Washington, D.C.

The survey is at http://www.healthcarevox.com/2006/06/corporate_blogging_and_jupiter.html.

New Media: A Road Tour and a Seminar

I’m chairing a three-day conference on blogging and podcasting, set for October 18-20 in San Francisco. Titled, “How to Use Blogging & Podcasting to Engage Your Customers & Build Your Brand,” the seminar will include some terrific speakers from companies like IBM, Southwest Airlines, Whirlpool, Cisco Systems, and more. I’m delivering the keynote address and a post-conference workshop.

Details are here: http://www.aliconferences.com/conferences/blogging_podcasting/1006.html.

I’ll also be on the road in October and November with a new two-day workshop for Ragan Communications titled, “Connecting with the Wired World.” In this workshop, I’ll cover how to…

Reach your many and varied audiences through better and smarter online writing techniques
Develop audio, video and animated content that will engage your audiences as never beforeóand reach new ones
Monitor what customers, competitors, employees, activists and others are saying about you online and in the blogosphereóand be ready to influence the discussion
Sell the concepts of blogs, podcasting and other social media tools to a management skeptical of new tools and technologies

Engage your audiences in an online conversationóand mitigate the risks inherent in participatory communications

I’ll relate this to intranets, blogs, wikis, social media sites, social bookmarking and tagging, citizen and open-source media, and RSS.

Here’s the lineup:

10/05-06: San Francisco
10/23-24: New York
10/26-27: Washington, DC
10/30-31: Chicago
11/02-03: Atlanta
11/13-14: Toronto, ONT, Canada

Get the details and register online at http://snipurl.com/ragan_connect.

More Reasons to Take Second Life Seriously

ZDNet has released a couple videos that reinforce the idea that Second Life is something businesses -— and business communicators -— need to understand and, perhaps, embrace. The first looks at a convention center built in SL by new-media whiz-kid Eric Rice, which includes the ability to project video and audio into a meeting space. Rice is planning on renting the facility to organizations interested in meetings in the virtual world. The second looks at efforts by the University of California at Davis to use the simulation functionality of SL to train emergency workers.

The videos are at: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3404

Meanwhile, I finally got around to some of my backed-up podasts and heard Karl Long interview two representatives from Electric Sheep (which builds SL venues) and one from Linden Labs (which built and operates SL). The trio talk about the future, which includes seamless integration between the real-time 3D world of Second Life and the asynchronous, 2D world of the web. It’s a revealing conversation that shines an even brighter light on the metaverse’s business potential.

There’s another another nifty simulation created for Second Life with serious real-world implications. Jeremy Kemp, with SimTeach, has developed a medical facility with three exam rooms. In each, patients await diagnosis. Medical trainees listen to each patient’s heart to determine whether anything is wrong and, if so, what the problem is.

Yahoo! Launches a Corporate Blog

Yahoo!-— already the host to several product-oriented blogs -— has launched “Yodel Anecdotal,”, the company’s official corporate blog. Blog Editor Nicki Dugan has offered up the introductory post, noting that the blog will be used to…

“...cover emerging trends, provide some behind-the-scenes commentary, profile interesting Yahoos, spotlight our beloved users, reveal some of our quirks, tap into guest bloggers, sprinkle in some videos and photo essays, and generally think out loud (lucky you… you get to listen). You’ll hear from interns to executives. Some days we’ll be light and airy, others we’ll get serious.”

The initial entry -— which also features a virtual video tour of the Yahoo! campus -— has been greeted so far by 31 comments, every single one of them positive.

Another Lesson on Corporate Blogging

Today’s lesson: Once a post goes up, leave it up. Pulling it down can have worse consequences than letting it stand.

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington spins the tale of Microsoft developer Stuart Padley, whose blog was last updated in October 2005 before he posted an item explaining that, after finishing work on SQL Server 2005, he was selected by Ray Ozzie to work on the Windows Live Drive project, the company’s impending entry into the file hosting business. While nothing in the post is confidential, according to Arrington, it vanished shortly after it was posted, most likely because some Microsoft executive ordered it down.

Arrington, however, pointed to the post’s cache on Bloglines and posted a screen shot. So today, the story is about Microsoft yanking down an innocuous post rather than the confirmation that Windows Live Drive is coming—something those who pay attention to such matters already knew. Between Arrington’s post and Robert Scoble’s link to it, the story is bound to get a fair amount of attention.

Some may point to this incident as a reason for business not to blog. From where I sit, it’s a reason to ensure you have a blogging policy and that it’s well communicated so the risk of employees posting something they shouldn’t is minimized.

Sites of the Month

Cameron Olthuis got the ball rolling on his blog, “Pronet Advertising,” with a list of ”10 things you should be monitoring.” Jeremiah Owyang added seven items on his blog. Then Joseph Jaffe extended the list further on Jaffe Juice.

No doubt, several others in the communications blogging community can add more to this list, but the fragmented nature of blogs means some will add to one list, others to another, and the whole collaborative effort will spiral into chaos.

But that’s what wikis are for. So I’ve copied the entire list as it stands to The New PR, where everybody can work on a single master list.

http://www.thenewpr.com/wiki/pmwiki.php?pagename=WhatToMonitor.HomePage

This could be loads of fun. The Washington Post has launched a consumer participation activity that starts with a video of political reporter Dana Milbank asking questions. You’re invited to download the video and, using your own software, insert your own answers. (The premise: You’re a candidate in an election that’s a week away.) The questions themselves are fun to watch, but it’ll be entertaining as hell to see what people come up with.
image

It’s not a contest, exactly, since there’s no judging and no winners. In fact, the Post says it’ll continue to upload new videos for as long as people continue to submit them. Viewers will rate and comment on what they’ve seen. (I expect bunches of these to find their way to YouTube, as well.)

The rules are simple. Submissions have to be under three minutes and submitted in either Quicktime or Windows Media format. You have to own all the rights to anything you include. And that’s it.

I’m sure this will have its share of detractors. However, it’s nothing but fun and invites readers to co-create with the Post. It could be a win for the newspaper and a model for others to adopt.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2006/08/01/VI2006080100794.html?referrer=email

HC+T Update

I’m wrapping up work on a manuscript for McGraw-Hill’s “How to Do Everything” series: “How to Do Everything with Podcasting.” It should be published in early 2007.
I’ll be attending a meeting in early September of a new executive forum for internal communicators, sponsored by ROI Communications. I’m working with Roger D’Aprix and Brad Whitworth to put the forum together.
I’ve been working as part of a group to develop a social media press release. We cover our weekly efforts in a podcast you can find here: http://forimmediaterelease.biz/index.php/C5/

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Posted by Shel on 08/26 at 02:36 PM
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Friday, July 28, 2006

HC+T Update: July 2006

HC+T Update: July 2006

HC+T Update
July 2006

Eradicating Astroturfing
Blog the Way We Tell You To. Right Now, Dammit!
Prioritizing Customers Over Owners
No Technology Used in Theft of Coca-Cola’s Intellectual Property
Our Own Insulated Little World
My Road Tour is Getting Closer
Cost-Avoidance as PR Measurement
May I Brag?
Two webinars on tap
Site of the month
HC+T update
Boilerplate and subscription information

As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog over the past month. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. Eradicating Astroturfing

An email from Trevor Cook alerted me to a campaign Trevor and Paull Young are undertaking to fight the scourge of astroturfing. Young has created a campaign home page on The New PR wiki, and he and Erin Caldwell have developed the logo you see here, and in the affiliations section of this blog’s left-hand column.

I’m more than happy to support this cause. Astroturfing is one of those behaviors employed by the bottom-feeders of the industry that paint the rest of us with their brush. When exposed (as it more and more frequently is), it only serves to damage the reputation of the company associated with the campaign. While a read of the code of ethics of the various communication associations makes it clear that astroturfing falls outside the bounds of ethical behavior, these same associations don’t talk about it much. I was perplexed, to say the least, to read Young’s account of a seminar hosted by the Public Relations Institute of Australia that seemed to give tacit approval to astroturfing in some instances.

Astroturfing has no place in any PR practitioner’s toolkit. It is deceptive, dishonest, unethical. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the concept is simple—employ people to submit letters to the editor, blog posts, or comments to blogs that make it appear that a grassroots effort is taking root. A good example of this unconscionable practice is the instance in which the president of Halliburton arm-twisted employees to send letters to editors of their local newspapers extolling the company’s virtues in the face of increasing criticism. (The term refers to the artificial grass used in sporting venues; it’s hard to tell the difference between the fake and the real.)

While Cook’s and Young’s blog posts both contain the list of actions you can take to support this campaign, I’ll reiterate them here:

Join the conversation - write against astroturfing on your blog or comment on the blog posts listed on the Anti-Astroturfing page on the New PR Wiki
Declare you and/or your agency astroturf free
Expose possible examples of astroturfing
Link to the Anti-Astroturfing page with the image provided and add your name to the list of supporters below
Call on your politicians to take tougher legislative action against astroturfing
Call on your industry / professional association to speak out against astroturfing
Encourage friends and colleagues to get involved

As I have repeated so often, the vast majority of practitioners in our profession work hard every day without ever crossing an ethical line, producing solid results for their clients while displaying amazing levels of creativity and innovation. Yet all of us are viewed as lowlife purveyors of spin and propaganda thanks to the minority of lazy, dishonest, talentless hacks who employ tactics like astroturfing to compensate for their lack of skill, talent, or professionalism. If we want to change the public view of PR, we have to eradicate these kinds of practices.

2. Blog the Way We Tell You To. Right Now, Dammit!

Back in the early 1990s, when I worked in communications at Allergan, Inc., the company introduced a new silicon intraocular lens, the artificial lens used to replace a bad organc crystalline lens during cataract surgery. A silicon lens offered significant advantages over the phacoemulsification lens that had been the industry standard since the Korean War. An ophthalmologist could insert the lens folded in half, requiring a much smaller incision that could be closed with a single stitch, promoting faster healing and reduced risk of infection.

Allergan’s marcom staff knew their biggest challenge was convincing doctors to try something new. Not only would they be skeptical and reluctant to change something they were familiar with that worked, they would also have to learn new surgical techniques. The effort to get docs to embrace the silicon lens would take years.

So it is in just about every profession, every business. New ideas do not sweep any business community overnight -— not the medical profession, not communications.

Knowing this, I’m growing a bit weary of the snipes and jabs at anyone who doesn’t immediately (man, am I getting tired of this phrase) “get it.” I saw a comment on the Repman blog yesterday that proclaimed, “digital has been around for 3 or so years, so if (PR) folks don’t get it yet, i doubt they will.” Oh, please. If medical device manufacturers gave up on doctors after three years, medical practices would be mired in the dark ages.

I am equally bemused by the harsh judgement passed down by some on businesses just putting their toes in the water of social media. Dell has launched a blog at http://one2one.dell.com. The first post came on July 5; the official announcement of the blog’s presence was made yesterday. The blog was inspired by MSDN’s Channel 9, designed to create transparency and open a dialogue.

Consider what it probably took to get a Dell blog launched. More than likely, some executives needed to be convinced by lower-ranking enthusiasts. The execs’ reluctance was based on having already been burned in the blogosphere. They probably gave their approval after many presentations and memos, but with caveats and conditions. Still, the blog is accepting critical comments, and the company has made commitments about the blog’s openness. So with a mere seven posts under its belt and still feeling its way around, how has the blog been greeted?

Jeff Jarvis, the blogger who stirred up the storm of controversy with his Dell Hell posts, wrote:

“The subtitle is ‘direct conversations with Dell’ but this is as much a conversation as yelling at a brick wall. There is not one link there. It’s filled with promotions for Dell’s wonderfulness.”

Steve Rubel chided:

“When I read the one2one doctrine, their heart seems like it’s in the right place. Their actions don’t speak that way. Perhaps it might have been better for them to have stayed silent.”

Time for a deep breath. The blog’s authors are real people serving as human touch points for customers, and given a bit of time to find its footing, one2one could very well be exactly what Jarvis, Rubel and the other critics believe it should be. But blogs do need time to find their voice—especially group blogs—and corporations don’t move at the same light speed as individual bloggers and evangelist agencies. Is there no slack to be cut among the superior early adopters who have already figured things out?

Props to Andy Lark for counseling patience:

“The bloggerati just need to get over every blog coming out the gate reading like a conversation at the local pub and not rehashing the past trials and tribulations of bloggers. It takes time for a corporate blog to find its collective voice.”

There’s a fine line between evangelizing and sanctimony. Or, to put it another way: Guide, don’t chide.

3. Prioritizing Customers Over Owners

I had only been working for my new employer as manager of employee communications for a day or two when I was summoned to the president’s office. “We have adopted a new business philosophy and we need it communicated to employees,” he said. The new philosophy, adopted by the executive committee a week or so earlier, was a commitment to SVE—Shareholder Value Enhancement.

As I listened to the principles of SVE, I grew increasingly alarmed and concerned. Every decision made, the focus of every activity, had to be undertaken with shareholder value enhancement in mind. Employees would need to understand that and understand the drivers of shareholder value. I expressed my concern: “Can you really see employees jumping out of bed in the morning, fired up to get to work so they can enhance shareholder value?”

They should, I was told, seeing as how they were all owners themselves. True: Through the employee stock ownership program and the 401(k) plan, most employees held stock. The average employee probably owned 0.0000001% of the company. In any case, I was told, this decision was a done deal. (It had been pushed, it turned out, by the chief financial officer.)

The share price of the company’s stock the day that president retired was virtually unchanged from its value the day he took the job. In fact, the SVE movement has proved to be a dud. If you need an example of what happens when companies focus on shareholder value, look no further than Enron, another company that embraced the philosophy.

Of course, the notion of focusing on shareholder returns was not introduced with the SVE movement. Corporate mission statements are replete with shareholder statements, like this one:

Acme Inc. is committed to enhancing shareholder value through the active management of long-term investments and responsible corporate citizenship. It is of the view that these objectives are best achieved and risks minimized through sectoral and geographic diversification. (This is a real statement; I’ve just changed the company name.)

The immediate question that would arise in the mind of anybody in any audience reading this mission statement is, “Yeah, but what do you do?”

I certainly am not suggesting that a company should not strive to provide solid returns to their owners; it would be a rare company that would survive if it failed to make a profit. The point is that shareholder value is created as an outcome of what the company does. The better an organization fulfills its mission, the more money it should make. But if making money is the mission itself, companies are likely to fail miserably at it.

The problem is in the decision-making process. Decisions made with shareholders top-of-mind are often very, very bad decisions. If Johnson & Johnson had made shareholders their top priority when bottles of Tylenol were being poisoned, they would have left the product on store shelves. Instead, the company’s credo put patients at the top of their priority list and opted to pull all product, a costly decision to be sure, but one that bolstered their reputation and pushed Tylenol sales to new levels when the product was reintroduced with new safety caps the company had innovated.

Of course, holders of Johnson & Johnson stock benefitted mightily from the company’s customer focus…as do owners of any company that puts its attention squarely on the people upon whom the company depends to buy its products or services. A good mission statement is not about making money or providing a return, which any company must do. A good mission statement is about what the company does that will make customers want to do business with them. Southwest Airlines’ mission statement reads…

“We are committed to provide our Employees a stable work environment with equal opportunity for learning and personal growth. Creativity and innovation are encouraged for improving the effectiveness of Southwest Airlines. Above all, Employees will be provided the same concern, respect, and caring attitude within the organization that they are expected to share externally with every Southwest Customer.”

And Southwest is the most profitable airline in the U.S. Which is not to suggest there are no profitable companies with lousy mission statements. In many companies, mission statements are little more than words on the wall. A customer-centric focus is produced from other corners of the organization.

But the issue does not end with mission statements. Companies need to get their employees focused on customers by any means. Employees who design product, those who manufacture it, and those who provide service to customers who have already bought product are equally critical. Equally important is investing in these activities, notably customer support and tech support, which has taken a hit in recent years as part of cost-reduction efforts.

Some may dismiss the need to invest in customer support, but anybody who has taken a single business class knows how desperately companies rely on repeat business and referrals to grow the bottom line. Unhappy customers—even those who have already plunked down their money—will produce unhappy owners every day of the week. What’s more, unhappy customers can affect a company’s reputation, and Charles Fombrun has proven a correlation between diminished reputation and diminished profitability.

There are other ways to focus employee attention and company investment. A statement of strategic intent is a short-term mission that provides employees with a laser-like focus. Caterpillar once had a statement of strategic intent: “Beat Komatsu.” The idea was simple: If you’re working on something that isn’t helping us beat our number one competitor, why are you doing it? But of course, creating and retaining satisfied customers would be critical to beating the competition, the likely place customers would go if they’re not buying from you.

Hence, anybody who suggests that companies shouldn’t desire strong relationships with their customers is, frankly, an idiot. Solid customer relationships may be costly, but having no customers is far more expensive. The return on solid customer relationships is exactly what shareholders crave: repeat business, referrals, growth and profitability.

As the leaders at Johnson & Johnson will be the first to tell you, take care of your customers first and shareholder value will take care of itself.

4. No Technology Used in Theft of Coca-Cola’s Intellectual Property

In a large company, odds are there are a few rotten apples. No matter how rigorous the recruiting process, how thorough the background checks, a handful of these losers will sneak through the net. It’s just inevitable. They grouse and complain about their employers no matter how well they’re treated. They take sick days when they’re not sick. They abuse privileges. Given the opportunity, they can engage in criminal activity. And they don’t need the Internet to do any of it.

The case of three arrests in Atlanta yesterday should be instructive to companies implementing draconian policies to lock down their intranets and restrict the uses to which hard-working, honest employees put the company’s networks. Joya Williams, an administrative assistant to a high-ranking Coca-Cola executive, was arrested along with two others on charges of wire fraud and stealing Coke’s trade secrets, then trying to sell them to rival Pepsi-Co. How do federal prosecutors say Williams did it? By rifling through paper files and stuffing documents, along with a sample of a new Coca-Cola soft drink, into a personal bag. The offer to sell the items to Pepsi came in a letter in one of Coke’s official business envelopes, mailed through the U.S. mail.

Huge props go to Pepsi, which turned the evidence over to the feds. Dave DeCecco, a Pepsi spokesman, was quoted as saying, “Competition can sometimes be fierce, but also must be fair and legal.”

The point, though, is that locking down computer networks did not prevent Williams from doing what the feds claim she did. It’s not the networks; it’s the people. Most employees would never engage in illegal behavior or deliberately damage the company they work for. These employees can, in fact, produce even better work if given unfettered access to the Net. As for the ne’er-do-wells, they don’t need the Net to damage their employers, as the Coke case clearly shows.

So companies might as well loosen their restrictions so the vast majority of employees can take advantage of the resources available online, while dealing with the bottom feeders as a matter of exception.
5. Our Own Insulated Little World

Many corporate communication departments operate in a silo. They take instructions from above and perform environmental scans, and prepare communications to address needs coming from both directions. This model worked fine when all messages between a company and its publics were filtered through the communications department.

In the era of social computing, however, employees are in direct contact with customers (I have a personal example: Microsoft developer Dean Hachamovich responded directly to my complaint about a glitch in Internet Explorer 7, and I’ll bet he didn’t clear it with PR first). Remaining blissfully unaware of the connections employees are making with audiences can have significant repercussions for PR departments.

For a case in point, look to Jon Udell’s blog post of of June 3 (which I just saw, thanks to a pointer from Andy Lark). Here, Udell recounts what happened after a developer at Google invited him to look at a new API. Udell told the developer he’d rather talk to someone about the GData API. The developer promised to have someone get in touch with him. What followed was a series of contacts with a PR department that had no clue about what was going on. When he explained he was responding to a contact with a developer, the communicator said, ““Can you also please contact the communications team rather than going to the product folks directly so we can make sure your inquiry is routed to the appropriate party and answered in a timely fashion?” Remember, Udell was contacted by the developer, not the other way around.

Then, to make matters worse, when Udell reiterated his interest in talking to someone about the GData API, the communicator said, “What does Gdata refer to? We don’t have a product called Gdata that I’m aware of…”

By the time the PR folks at Google got back to Udell offering an interview —- assuming he forwarded his questions first —- Udell was disenchanted enough to pass. Google lost the opportunity for some coverage by Udell, an Information Week writer.

I don’t mean to pick on Google’s PR team. It’s a story I’ve seen repeated in dozens of companies where the communicators are so insulated from the rest of the company that they don’t know who’s talking to whom or what the company’s working on. Part of functioning in a PR role in the world of social media includes establishing processes for staying in touch so we can be prepared to address questions and issues as they arise.

Does anybody work for PR in a company where such processes have been established? I’d love to hear what those processes are and how they’re working.

6. My Road Tour is Getting Closer

I’ll be on the road in October and November with a new two-day workshop titled, “Connecting with the Wired World.” In this workshop, I’ll cover how to…

Reach your many and varied audiences through better and smarter online writing techniques
Develop audio, video and animated content that will engage your audiences as never before—and reach new ones
Monitor what customers, competitors, employees, activists and others are saying about you online and in the blogosphere—and be ready to influence the discussion
Sell the concepts of blogs, podcasting and other social media tools to a management skeptical of new tools and technologies
Engage your audiences in an online conversation—and mitigate the risks inherent in participatory communications

I’ll relate this to intranets, blogs, wikis, social media sites, social bookmarking and tagging, citizen and open-source media, and RSS.

Here’s the lineup:

10/05-06: San Francisco
10/23-24: New York
10/26-27: Washington, DC
10/30-31: Chicago
11/02-03: Atlanta
11/13-14: Toronto, ONT, Canada

Get the details and register online at http://snipurl.com/ragan_connect.

7. Cost Avoidance as PR Measurement

Earlier this month, I reported on coverage of a Kansas City councilwoman’s dismay that the city had spent $2 million on public relations. My point, based on my reading of the Kansas City Star article, was that the PR industry has done a lousy job of explaining its value. As a result, nobody is surprised when people like Councilwoman Becky Nace express outrage that civic funds would be invested in such a clearly worthless activity. The money, she suggests, could have been better spent elsewhere.

John Wagner (whose blog is on my must-read list) thinks Councilwoman Nace’s objection may not be to the PR activities per se, but rather to the amount invested. In a comment to my original post, John wrote, “Doesn’t it strike anyone that $2 million is a lot of money to spend on educating people about sewers? Perhaps Nace isn’t really questioning the importance of PR ...she’s questioning the amount of cash it takes for these agencies to get the job done.” That’s not the way I read the Star article, but it’s still a valid question, and one that gives me the opportunity to raise the notion of cost-avoidance as a metric for public relations efforts.

I first started thinking about cost-avoidance about eight years ago when I interviewed the manager of a website called Camisea.com (it’s long gone so don’t bother looking for it). The site was the effort of a consortium of energy and engineering companies that were exploring for natural gas reserves in the Camisea region of the Peruvian rainforest. Rather than offer spin and hype in support of the project, the site was an early example of pure transparency. It included the full text of the environmental impact report, a comprehensive archive of documents outlining the exploration plan, and even a forum where visitors to the site could voice their concerns. The site cost US $250,000, much of which was spent on paying independent experts to author sections of the site; for example, Smithsonian anthropologists penned the section dealiing with the people of the Camisea and the potential impact of the exploration on their way of life.

A quarter of a million dollars may sound like a huge investment —- particularly in 1997 or so —- for a website. However, the dozen-and-a-half companies comprising the consortium were acutely aware of the investment companies like Mitsubishi had made in response to Rainforest Action Network activities that targeted them…hundreds of millions of dollars in Mitsubishi’s case. The quarter-million-dollar site was designed to make sure the Network had all the information it needed to determine that no action was necessary. In fact, the site creators asked the Network to partner with them to develop content that would address its constituent’s needs. As a direct result of the site, the Network took no action against the Camisea project (which was eventually abandoned as economically unviable).

I don’t know what led the directors of Kansas City’s water agency to decide it was important to assemble panels with diverse memberships to meet frequently to decide which wastewater technologies were best suited to their neighborhoods; the following is purely hypothetical. But what if there already were rumblings of community-based lawsuits designed to oppose the project? What if the agency’s leaders had experience with local opposition? What would it have cost the city if work began, then was halted as citizens took the city to court? It is not unreasonable to assume that the costs of such action would far exceed the cost of working with an outside agency to build community consensus. Thus, it would not be unreasonable for the agency to invest half a million dollars in the consensus-building effort in order to avoid spending $20 million in legal and construction delay costs later.

In a comment to another blog, Wagner writes, “Doesn’t $2 million sound like an awful lot of money to educate people about sewers??” But clearly the effort went beyond education and into the realm of negotiation and consensus-building. (This was just one project, by the way; the total $2 million was paid to four agencies for a variety of projects.)

Institutions need to understand the potential damage that can occur when they fail to engage in two-way communication and determine what it’s worth to do the work upfront. Half a million dollars -— assuming the agency’s billings reflect legitimate and necessary work that produced the desired results -— could be a real bargain if it saves $20 million down the road.

8. May I Brag?

I just received the evaluation results of the breakout session I conducted on the last day of IABC‘s 2006 international conference. Normally, I scour the written-in comments for tips on how to improve my presentation style and I don’t shout out that I ranked in the top five or the top 25. But the results I got today lead me to toss humility to the wind and proclaim:

I’M NUMBER 1!

Yep, out of 73 breakout speakers, my session—“The Practical Impact of Social Media on Your Organization”—was top of the charts. A couple choice comments from the session evaluation (and I didn’t pay for a single one of these):

Have Shel back every year! Amazing, revolutionary, great ideas!
Dynamic speaker, info-packed session. Rating: A+ + !
Shel is great once again. My most valued session. Hope to have my yearly next great idea from this session.
Wow, this is amazing. I feel prepared for conversations with clients about social media.
Great information. Excellent resources. It’s an important enough topic to be either a general session, or one with minimum competing sessions.

Okay, that’s enough. Brag-mode off.
9. Two New Webinars Slated

Two new Webinars are slated for August.

First, beginning August 7, we’ll repeat Steve Crescenzo’s incredibly popular Webinar, “Writing for Employees.” This is the fifth go-around for this Webinar, which has attracted about 100 participants each time it’s been presented.

Then, starting August 28, we’ll begin “The New Fundamentals of Employee Communications,” which I’m heading up. This Webinar will look at the changes to some of internal communications’ ground rules, many of which are the result of social media’s impact while other are based on changing employee perceptions of work, management, and companies. If you work in internal communications, this is a can’t-be-missed session!

For details, visit the website for Shel Holtz Webinars at http://www.raganwebinars.com.

10. Site of the Month

SHIFT Communications has introduced a 30-page PDF guide to the world of social media aimed squarely at the public relations community. As SHIFT’s Todd Defren points out on his blog, regular participants and readers in the PR blogosphere won’t find much new here, but most practitioners aren’t anywhere near up to speed on the tools that are altering the communication landscape or how to use them.

The free download—titled ”PR 2.0 Essentials: A Necessarily Living Document“—is neatly organized, covering RSS, blogs, podcasts, wikis, social networks and social bookmarking. There’s also a section on memes, one on the social media press release, and one on IM and SMS. Two additional sections provide links to tools and other reference materials.

Each section covers not only the fundamentals, but also material of particular interest to PR practitioners, like how to pitch to bloggers, how to employ them as PR tactics, and why these tools and channels are important to clients.

http://www.shiftcomm.com/downloads/pr2essentials.pdf

11. HC+T update

I’m conducting an intranet audit for a major national dairy cooperative. I’m thrilled to be working once again with Tudor Williams, ABC, on the project.
My speaking calendar is filling up. I’m conducting sessions in the months ahead for Lockheed, The Conference Board, IABC chapters in Phoenix and San Antonio, the University of Arizona, a Texas bank and the Portable Media and Podcast Expo, in addition to a couple Ragan conferences, among others.
I just wrapped up a social media review for a travel company. They wanted to know their risk in the blogosphere and how to address it.

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Posted by Shel on 07/28 at 06:54 AM
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Monday, June 26, 2006

HC+T Update: June 2006

HC+T Update: June 2006

HC+T Update
June 2006

What CSR means to the average person isn’t what you might think
Live-blogging a shareholder’s meeting
What’s next for blogebrities? Paparazzi?
Hiring companies may want to acquire your blog along with you
Technorati tests microformat search
I’m hitting the road for a two-day workshop on new media
RSS vs. Email: The first phase of new technology
Tangible consequences of PR’s image problem
Two webinars on tap
Site of the month
HC+T update
Boilerplate and subscription information

As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog over the past month. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

What CSR means to the average person isn’t what you might think

A few weeks ago, I was in Washington, D.C. to moderate the ”Beyond Blogging 2006“ symposium sponsored by Fleishman Hillard. I got in a few days early and had a couple meetings at Fleishman’s DC offices, where I met Tony Colandro. Among other things, Tony has been working on a major study Fleishman commissioned to get a handle on how people perceive the notion of corporate social responsibility (CSR). He shared an executive summary of the study, conducted by the National Consumers League, that was eye-opening, to say the least.

I was embargoed from reporting on the study until it was released, which occurred today with nicely-placed coverage in the New York Times.

Just what did the study reveal?

If you ask most people working in corporations who have an interest in the company’s reputation, the answers come quickly with a bit of a derisive lift of the eyebrow, as in, “How can you not know this?” It’s a matter of how the company treats the environment, how much money it donates to charitable causes, how good a neighbor it is in the communities where it maintains facilities.

If that’s what you think most people consider CSR, you’d be wrong. According to the study, 27% of the respondents said they assessed CSR based on how well the organization demonstrated its commitment to the well being of its employees. In case you’re staring at the screen about to utter, “Whaaaaa..?” let me reiterate. How well a company treats its employees is the number one factor that leads others to rate the company’s corporate social responsibility. Only 3% said corporate donations were the key indicator.

Tony told me he was just as surprised.

Businesses frequently invest a considerable amount in promoting their charitable giving. The Times article cites the Journal of Philanthropy that “highlights several companies that have made marketing alliances with nonprofit groups, dedicating a percentage of sales of certain products to a specific charity or agreeing to support a specific program or project.” The only problem is, with only 3% of respondents citing donations as the most important sign of CSR, you have to wonder how much good it’s doing from a reputational standpoint—especially for companies that have a less-than-sterling reputation for how they treat their own workers.

This study should be a big deal among human resources and employee communications professionals, who can now make a stronger case for more resources. It should also make some companies that have been dismissing employee concerns rethink their philosophies. (Did anybody hear me say “Wal*Mart?”)

Why would companies’ leaders be so interested in what constitutes CSR in the minds of their publics? The knowledge that a lot of people make decisions about whom to do business with based on the organization’s perceived CSR. There are even stock funds based on investing in socially responsible companies.

As for how companies are doing, far more respondents gave business low scores than high ones in rating their CSR.

The study results are so compelling that Fleishman Hillard has launched a blog on the topic at http://fhcsr.typepad.com/csr_blog/. The first post to the blog covers the survey results; comments are turned on. The blog should be worth watching, both in terms of the kinds of commentary Fleishman posts to it and the kinds of comments it receives.

2. Live-blogging a shareholder’s meeting

I have live-blogged a couple of events, including the first and second New Communications Forums this year and last. Live-blogging conferences has gotten to be a fairly routine thing these days, making it easy for those who can’t be there to get updates on who said what in pretty close to real time.

As live-blogging from conferences continues to spread in both application and popularity, it was only a matter of time before the practice spread to events other than conferences. Today, Wal-Mart is the focus of a live-blogging effort taking place from its annual shareholders meeting. Blogging Stocks, an AOL property, is live-blogging as the meeting unfolds via webcast.

The post begins, “What’s in store for today? We’ll be on it, so keep your finger poised over that “Refresh” button on your browser, as we’ll be updating this post in real-time as the webcast rolls on.”

Each update begins with a time code, as in this entry:

“8:57am -— the fourth resolution is now up, and this one involves the publication of a comprehensive sustainability report, which would include the stewardship of Wal-Mart across almost every area of the business: labor, suppliers, logistics, expansion, subsidies, political contributions, employee pay and injury rates, and corporate procedures…among others. Wow, that would be a full library of reports if you ask me.”

The entries stop with an observation that the Q&A is about to begin: “but I’m not sure if that will be webcast or not. If it is, we’ll be here.”

Wal-Mart may have wanted to restrict the webcast to all the positive rah-rah that the company orchestrated, including (according to the blog report) a performance by American Idol winner Taylor Hicks and speeches from executives. And, in this instance, the webcast was probably the only way to live-blog the shareholders meeting, since it’s not likely that WiFi was available in the Bud Walton Arena on the University of Arkansas campus, where the meeting is being held. I suppose anyone with a high-speed PC card would be able to blog the meeting on-site. Even if computers weren’t permitted in the Arena (and I don’t know that they weren’t), a cell phone is all anyone would really need.

I’m also not sure if this is the first time a shareholder’s meeting has been blogged—it’s just the first one of which I’m aware. But since it’s likely to become more common, companies might as well accommodate it, provide WiFi, and invite live blogging of their shareholder meetings.

3. What’s next for blogebrities? Paparazzi?

I have to admit, I’ve never heard of Joel Cheesman. Evidently, though, he’s well-known among Human Resources types. Cheesman blogs as Cheezhead and is CEO of a couple recruiting companies. His blog bio pegs him as “one of the Internet’s most famous and widely-read blogger on emerging recruitment issues in the world.”

While Cheesman could use an editor (how many of you immediately rewrote that awful sentence?), he’s enough of a celebrity to command $7,000 to promote a company at the upcoming gathering of the Society of Human Resources Management. Cheesman listed himself on eBay, offering a variety of benefits to the highest bid to sponsor his presence at the conference. The winning bid—$7,101—was ponied up by JobCentral. In return, the employment network gets Cheesman wearing a t-shirt bearing their logo, a mention on all of Cheesman’s podcasts from the conference, a banner ad on Cheesman’s blog, and a variety of other benefits.

In pitching the sponsorship on eBay, Cheesman included screen shots of his blog’s stats from Alexa. Cheesman’s stats are about three times better than mine, but nowhere near as good as Steve Rubel’s. Which leads me to the inevitable question: What would a company like Bacons bid in an eBay auction to win the chance to sponsor Steve at a PRSA conference?

Not that anyone could pay Steve enough to parade around PRSA in a t-shirt bearing the winner’s name, or put their banner on his blog, or write a post about the sponsorship, or do any of the other things Cheesman has done. It just raises the question about whether being an A-lister—or a “blogebrity”—has testimonial or spokesperson value. Among all the lists covering the ways bloggers can make money, one I haven’t seen is, “Sell your blogebrity status to the highest bidder.”

From Rubel’s ranking we can move up the scale and speculate about Jeff Jarvis appearing on a TV commercial for one of Dell Computers’ competitors or Om Malik in a magazine ad touting a NetGear or Linksys wireless router. Again, such sellout opportunities could well be far beneath Jarvis and Malik; but it’s intriguing to ponder whether some (like those who get homepage attention on Technorati) have ascended to the level where their mere blogginess has monetary value.

As for me, there’s no way I’d become a pitchman for a company at the IABC conference for $7,101. Make it $25,000 and we’ll talk.

4. Hiring companies may want to acquire your blog along with you

Rex Hammock congratulates Terry Heaton for his new gig at Audience Research and Development of Dallas. What caught my eye, though, was Hammock’s observation that Heaton’s blog would move with him. Heaton himself notes, “(ARD’s) Jerry (Gumbert) and I have agreed that I will continue blogging.”

This seems to represent something of a trend. David Jones is continuing to author the PR blog he started while at Thornley Fallis after moving to Fleishman Hillard (Canada); Jones also is continuing his Inside PR podcastwith co-host Terry Fallis. Jeremy Pepper’s excellent and provocative POP! PR blog rolls on now that he’s working for Weber Shandwick. Chris Clarke’s Student PR blog is now Student PR @ Work (Clarke was snatched up by Thornley Fallis after graduation.) Erin Caldwell, another student PR blogger, was grabbed by Edelman Worldwide; she now writes as part of the group blog, Forward.

All of which has me wondering if hiring organizations—particularly PR agencies—view the candidate’s blog as an asset they are acquiring along with the employee. Certainly the blogs in each of these cases played a part in the hiring decision: The combination of visible writing skills and understanding of social media are attractive qualities. (The whole “hired-for-blogging” thing has been reported to death.) And certainly the new-hire is the target. I can’t imagine a company ever hiring a blogger, then ending the employment arrangement while hanging onto the blog. But does Weber Shandwick, for instance, view POP! PR Jots as something tangible they got along with Jeremy?

Jeremy’s blog—while not a Weber Shandwick property—attaches itself to the Weber Shandwick brand as a matter of course: Jeremy works for WS, Jeremy has a blog, the blog is therefore affiliated, even if informally, with WS. Thus, Jeremy’s pithy observations reflect upon Weber Shandwick. The folks who hired Jeremy surely knew this and saw that as beneficial. The same holds true for Fleishman Hillard, Thornley Fallis, and Edelman Worldwide.

Practitioners seeking employment should consequently keep in mind that their blogs may be more than just an enhancement to their resume. They could be part of the package, an asset the company wants them to bring with them to the job.

5. Technorati tests microformat search

The more services I see roll out that aggregate content from “the edge,” the more convinced I become that this represents a considerable shift in publishing models that will become more and more common. The idea, if it’s new to you, is simple. Rather than send your content to someone else to publish—such as a classified ad in a newspaper—you publish it on your own site and tag it appropriately so sites that aggregate such content can add it to their listings.

There is a growing number of examples, from classified ad aggregator Edgeio to the Memeorandum series of sites that collect news from around the web, aggregate it, and rank it based on popularity.

But the entry of Technorati, the 800-pound gorilla of blog search, into the edge-content arena may signify that the concept is about to grow in terms of both visibility and use.

On its Kitchen test site, Technorati has introduced the ability to search for microformat content, specifically events, contacts, and reviews. In order to get an event listed as a search result—which presents its findings chronologically—all you have to do is publish the event on your own site or blog using the correct microformating, as in this example.

Technorati—which is already out there scouring blogs—would identify this an event using the hcalendar microformat, and list it; try it yourself at http://kitchen.technorati.com—just click the “events” tab and type in the name of your nearest big city.

The syntax for microformats is pretty simple, and I can’t imagine why organizations wouldn’t start including them for all their events and contacts to increase visibility. And the more I think about the whole “edge” concept, the more potential I see for intranets. More on that later, after I’ve had a chance to turn it over in my mind a bit.

In the meantime, Technorati has also launched Pingerati. According to the site:

“Pingerati receives updates of pages with Microformat data in, and passes them on to services that are interested in indexing them. With the growth of services that publish and index microformats, there is a need to connect the publishers with the indexers. The ‘ping to update’ model has worked well with weblogs, but is not ideal for other kinds of pages that may contain microformats.”

Hat tip to Stowe Boyd, who also likes the idea:

“This is a great example of supporting the edge activities of individuals with core infrastructure. Partnering with companies like EVDB and Upcoming.org, Technorati is taking another step forward in supporting the critical principle of individuals controlling their own information.”

6. I’m hitting the road for a two-day workshop on new media

I’ll be on the road in October and November with a new two-day workshop titled, “Connecting with the Wired World.” In this workshop, I’ll cover how to…

Reach your many and varied audiences through better and smarter online writing techniques
Develop audio, video and animated content that will engage your audiences as never before—and reach new ones
Monitor what customers, competitors, employees, activists and others are saying about you online and in the blogosphere—and be ready to influence the discussion
Sell the concepts of blogs, podcasting and other social media tools to a management skeptical of new tools and technologies
Engage your audiences in an online conversation—and mitigate the risks inherent in participatory communications

I’ll relate this to intranets, blogs, wikis, social media sites, social bookmarking and tagging, citizen and open-source media, and RSS.

Here’s the lineup:

10/05-06: San Francisco
10/23-24: New York
10/26-27: Washington, DC
10/30-31: Chicago
11/02-03: Atlanta
11/13-14: Toronto, ONT, Canada

7. RSS vs. Email: The first phase of new technology

On Monday, Micro Persuasion blogger Steve Rubel posted ”35 ways you can use RSS today.” The list of links to offbeat feeds (like tracking drunk athletes) prompted numerous comments, most of which either listed other interesting feeds or pointed to similar lists. Neville Hobson applauded the list, calling its contents “terrific examples of how to think about RSS—a tool that enables you to get news and information about things that interest you, automatically and with very little effort.”

Over at Performancing.com, however, Brian Clark had a different take. In a post titled, ”How NOT to sell RSS,” Clark sniffs, “Now, tell me — couldn’t you rewrite that headline to read: ‘35 Ways People Used Email in 1998 (And Still Do Today)’?” Clark makes a couple points while noting that RSS is hardly the first online opt-in mechanism:

People like getting content by email
People don’t understand why they should switch to RSS
People don’t like change

The only way to sell RSS, Clark says, is to tell people why it’s better than email. Worse, he says, selling RSS isn’t much different than asking folks in 1995 if they’d like to get content via HTTP.

Clark makes some good points, but he’s wrong about a few things and, from where I sit, his points don’t invalidate Steve’s list. The main thing to keep in mind is that every new technology gets its start doing things the old technology did. Television, for example, initially broadcast radio shows; it was some time before innovators (Edward R. Murrow, Paddy Chayevsky, and the like) began thinking about things television could do that hadn’t been done before. The computer itself was initially a glorified typewriter and calculator. Those who built the first PCs did not envision it as a communication tool. The fact that TV first broadcast visual radio and the PC first gained steam with VisiCalc and PCWrite didn’t keep people from migrating from the old technology to the new. The migration was, however, gradual, so I’m not concerned that RSS has not yet enjoyed widespread adoption. As people begin to understand the benefits of RSS, they’ll begin to use it, particularly as it gets easier and easier.

Once Internet Explorer 7 rolls out, for example, with its built-in RSS functionality, a lot of folks will begin using it without necessarily understanding what RSS is and how it functions. (As a speaker at the New Communications Forum noted earlier this year, a lot of people use email without knowing what SMTP is.)

The uptake of RSS will occur, to some degree, because of things about which Clark is mistaken. First, people don’t like email. Clark cites a Nielsen-Norman study that found people develop tighter bonds with email newsletters than cold RSS feeds. Back in 2004, however, a study by Relemal determined that seven out of eight people believe subscribing to an opt-in e-mail list will result in more spam. And 83% have said they avoid subscribing to a list when they don’t trust the publisher, while 78% said they just don’t always believe a company’s official privacy statement…all of which makes feeds a more desirable option.

There is other research that confirms a declining trust in email, exacerbated by spam filters’ tendency to produce false positives, floods of unwanted CC’d messages from co-workers, messages that quote every preceding message in the thread, and well-meaning friends who forward ancient chain letters, causes, and jokes. But there’s another consideration: my 17-year-old daughter’s generation. They simply don’t use email, opting for tools they find more efficient. RSS is…well…more efficient than email for opt-in lists.

Clark also makes a very common mistake when he insists that people don’t like change. People love change. They longfor a change of scenery, a change of pace, a life-changing experience. People change jobs, change homes, change cars, change fashion styles. What people don’t like is being changed. Nobody’s forcing RSS on anybody; people are taking it up because it’s an improvement over email, and as it becomes easier and as the RSS label recedes into the background (which Clark endorses), that uptake will gain steam. After all, in 1995 you would have been hard-pressed to find a typewriter in anybody’s office, even though word processors just did what typewriters did.

And what will people do initially with RSS feeds? The same things they were doing with email, of course. That’s just the way technology adoption works. Clark’s position that selling RSS requires explaining its advantages over RSS is important, but once you’re sold, you need something to subscribe to. For all those people who are new to feeds and looking to find out what’s available out there, lists like Rubel’s are entirely worthwhile and a completely useful way to sell RSS.

One last point: I’m not sure Steve was selling RSS to potential subscribers as much as he was showing communicators the kinds of things they could implement on behalf of their companies and clients. For those of us who would create feeds, it is important to know what they are and how they work, and lists like this can give the brain a jump-start.

8. Tangible consequences of PR’s image problem

Kansas City Councilwoman Becky Nace isn’t happy that the city is spending $2 million on fees to four public relations agencies. She wonders if that money couldn’t have been better spent elsewhere, and she’s making noise about it. Nace’s dismay that a city would actually spend money on PR echoes the concerns of other civic leaders who have expressed similar outrage over their own cities hiring PR help.

Fortunately, in covering Nace’s criticism, The Kansas City Star has take the trouble to figure out just exactly what these agencies have been hired to do. An examination of their work reveals that some city initiatives just wouldn’t succeed without professional communication efforts supporting them. For example, one of the tasks was arranging public meetings to educate the public on a massive sewer and stormwater replacement project that could be the largest public works effort in Kansas City’s history. The head of the water services agency insisted it was important to get the word out, but there’s more to it than that. One of the agencies’ tasks is to assemble panels with diverse memberships to meet frequently to decide which wastewater technologies are best suited to their neighborhoods.

In other words, the agencies are charging $100 to $150 per hour to create community understand, dialogue, participation, involvement, and support for a project that otherwise could devolve into a public brouhaha (just ask the people behind Boston’s Big Dig). That’s the kind of work that PR people do that goes largely unrecognized while unethical behaviors employed by the minority of practitioners get all the attention. If Kansas City had the resources internally, they wouldn’t have to hire agencies. But work like this tends to be project-based. Ms. Nace doesn’t understand, though, noting that when she dies, she wants to be reincarnated as a consultant so she can earn $150 an hour.

A related Kansas City project is trying to motivate residents to construct “rain gardens” to help manage the city’s rainwater runoff. It’s a PR effort that has led 71 residents to construct and register such gardens so far, and more to build them without registering them.

I’m impressed that the Star researched the PR efforts and reported on their goals rather than simply report Councilwoman Nace’s objections, which is the approach most media take to such statements by public officials. We in the PR profession need to do a better job of spotlighting the positive work we do that is so much more than the what the public perceives: spinmeisters trying to get the public to drink our clients’ Kool-Aid.

To clarify: any client has the right to question a bill. Any client has the right to question the work an agency (or any other supplier or vendor) performs. My issue with Councilwoman Nace—and the other local politicians whose dismissal of PR I have reported in the past—is that they start with the assumption that PR can’t possibly have any value; the tone is, “We’re spending money on PR? Isn’t there something worthwhile we could be spending our money on instead?”

The problem is not with Councilwoman Nace, who responded based on a popular but inaccurate view of what PR is and what it does. The problem is with a public relations industry that has been unable to educate people like her about the value PR can bring to an organization, institution, even a city. (Even the local newspaper—usually one of the first to slam PR—found there was worth in the agencies’ efforts.) That’s why I concluded, “We in the PR profession need to do a better job of spotlighting the positive work we do that is so much more than the what the public perceives: spinmeisters trying to get the public to drink our clients’ Kool-Aid.”

9. upcoming webinar

Two new Webinars are slated for August.

First, beginning August 7, we’ll repeat Steve Crescenzo’s incredibly popular Webinar, “Writing for Employees.” This is the fifth go-around for this Webinar, which has attracted about 100 participants each time it’s been presented.

Then, starting August 28, we’ll begin “The New Fundamentals of Employee Communications,” which I’m heading up. This Webinar will look at the changes to some of internal communications’ ground rules, many of which are the result of social media’s impact while other are based on changing employee perceptions of work, management, and companies. If you work in internal communications, this is a can’t-be-missed session!

For details, visit the website for Shel Holtz Webinars at http://www.raganwebinars.com.

10. Site of the Month

For Immediate Release

Okay, I’m tooting my own horn here a bit, but I’m not pointing you to my podcast site just to attract more listeners. Earlier this month, Neville Hobson (my co-host) and I were asked to come to to New York and attend the 2006 Innovative Marketing conference, co-hosted by Columbia Business School (where the event was held) and Corante (http://www.corante.com). We sat in a small conference room interviewing one conference speaker after another, 10 in all. The interviews are about 10-15 minutes each and are well worth your time. Among those interviewed: Larry Weber (the “Weber” in Weber Shandwick), Craig Newmark (founder of Craig’s List), and Russ Klein, chief marketing officer for Burger King. We also captured the audio of most of the presentations.

http://www.forimmediaterelease.biz

11. HC+T update

I’m conducting a pair of sessions on intranets and new media for a Canadian financial services company.
I have still more intranet audits in the works, one with a focus on manager/supervisor content for a major US airport.
I’m wrapping up work on my next book, “How to Do Everything with Podcasting,” written with the assistance of my podcast co-host, Neville Hobson.

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You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

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HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader.

Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

(C) 2006, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.

Posted by Shel on 06/26 at 12:14 PM
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Monday, May 29, 2006

HC+T Update: May 2006

HC+T Update: May 2006

The Press Release is Dead. Long Live the Press Release
Join Me June 1 for an Interactive Podcast
Hearing From Road Warriors Like You
Customer Service on the Edge
Virtual Meetings Gain Steam…Just Not in Business
Trust in Leadership is Worth Half a Million
Business Blogs in Regulated Companies
Workplace Surfing: Is the Tide Starting to Turn?
Do Corporations Need Blog Monitors?
Site of the month
HC+T update
Boilerplate and subscription information

As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog over the past month. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. The Press Release is Dead. Long Live the Press Release

I haven’t jumped aboard the “press release is dead” bandwagon because I just don’t believe it. I have no argument with the issues that lead supporters of the movement to proclaim the press release’s demise. They say that most press releases have no news and are poorly written. This isn’t a recent phenomenon. I remember working for $550 per month in 1975 as assistant editor of a weekly community newspaper. I was deluged with press releases, most of which made me roll my eyes in disgust.

The doomsayers also insist that new media can better serve the objectives press releases have offered. In some cases, that’s true. In others, I’m not so sure. There are plenty of current stories of press release effectiveness. And while the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission does not require material disclosure through press releases, press release services like PR Newswire and Business Wire know how to reach all the right audiences concurrently and satisfy the regulations that do exist.

Besides, as I’ve noted so frequently, new media do not kill old media. Old media adapt and evolve.

Shift Communications—a San Francisco-based PR agency—has given the press release a nudge along its evolutionary path. Shift’s Todd Defren, responding to “Silicon Valley Watcher” Tom Foremski’s original post calling for press releases to get with the interactive, social, digital era, proposed an approach that would satisfy Tom’s desires. According to Todd, Shift has released a social media press release template, which the company is making available to the profession:

“The template is 100% open to the PR/marketing community. No copyright baloney. We hope it can serve as a helpful guide to kickstart thinking about how we can evolve the PR sector. Maybe it can serve as a talking points memo to show to clients, to convince them to give it a try? Maybe you hate it? Maybe you’ve got some ideas on how to improve it.”

You can download a PDF of the template and view what Shift is touting as the first-ever press release to apply this next-generation format.

The release is broken into sections that are easily put to use by busy reporters and editors. First is contact information, followed by a headline and core news facts, preferably in bullet-list format. Then come a link and RSS feed for a “purpose-built” del.icio.us page. This page offers links to “relevant historical, trend, market, product & competitive content sources, providing context as-needed, and, on-going updates.”

Images and multimedia links are next, followed by pre-approved quotes, then links to relevant coverage to-date, boilerplate statements, an RSS feed to the company’s releases, an “add to del.icio.us” link, a Digg This link, and Technorati tags.

The press release Shift released is about the agency’s release of the new-media press release template, a great example of walking the talk if ever there was one. Shift has gone an extra step, creating a purpose-built del.icio.us site to track the evolution of the concept.

This is outstanding, thoughtful work and worthy of considerable recognition. The question remains, though: How many traditional PR practitioners are savvy enough about the changes occurring in the media and communication space to even recognize this is a good idea, no less be aware that the Shift template exists? In any event, those that figure it out will earn props from the media that find the press releases far more usable and useful, while those who continue spewing out the same old crap will earn their derision instead.

Todd Defren’s post: http://pr-squared.blogspot.com/2006/05/social-media-press-release-debuts.html

Social media press release:
http://www.shiftcomm.com/Web20Releases/5232006.html

Tom Foremski’s original post:
http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2006/02/die_press_relea.php

Download the template (PDF file):
http://www.shiftcomm.com/downloads/smprtemplate.pdf

2. Join Me June 1 for an Interactive Podcast

I was one of the participants on the conference call when “Naked Conversations” authors Robert Scoble and Shel Israel hosted the first interactive podcast offered by startup Waxxi. While I thought Scoble and Israel were just fine, I just didn’t get Waxxi. The conversation took place via a plain old conference call. Like most conference calls, it was recorded; this recording was to be converted to MP3 and made available as a podcast. While participants listened on the phone, they could also participate in a live online chat, made possible using a free chat utility that anybody can add to a web page.

The technology and the production process were such a no-big-deal that I decided I could do exactly the same thing. So, on Thursday, June 1, episode 142 of “For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report” will be live and interactive. Rather than spend the bucks for a conference call service, though, we’ll be using Skypecast (see item #5 below). At 9 a.m. PDT, 4 p.m. GMT, go to our Skypecast page:

https://skypecasts.skype.com/skypecasts/skypecast/detailed.html?id_talk=6843

You’ll be able to participate LIVE in the conversation Neville Hobson and I generally do by ourselves. We’ll record the entire session and post it as our regular podcast. At the same time you’re listening and (we hope) participating, you can also engage in a live, real-time chat right on our podcat website:

http://www.forimmediaterelease.biz/index.php/chat

You’ll need Skype to participate, but it’s completely free and drop-dead-easy to use. If you don’t already have it, just download it and install it at http://www.skype.com.

I hope to see you there!

3. Hearing From Road Warriors Like You

I wasn’t familiar with Steve Cody or his blog before today, but he’s now on my list of feeds. In a post on May 10, the co-founder of Peppercom, an independent PR agency, talks about a word-of-mouth campaign he came across involving jetBlue Airways.

This caught my attention because I’m a jetBlue fan. Sometime this year, I’ll hit 1 million true miles on United Airlines, which is a big deal. When you accrue 1 million true lifetime miles, United makes you a Premier Executive for life, even if you never fly another mile on their airline. Yet given the opportunity to accumulate those final 48,000 miles, I pass if I can take jetBlue instead, even though there’s no first class to which you can upgrade. I’m a jetBlue fan because of the way they treat passengers.

My wife and I were at Dulles International a year or so ago, scheduled to fly jetBlue back to the Bay Area. Weather delayed the flight 5-1/2 hours; a scheduled 7 p.m. flight left after midnight. The gate agents were constantly on the PA with updates, even if it was just to tell us they had no new information. They brought pillows and blankets from the jetway that were supposed to be boarded on the plane and handed them out to passengers waiting in the terminal. Then they went back down the jetway and brought up drinks and snacks. When we finally boarded, they gave each of us a free one-way ticket. “For a weather delay?” I asked. “You’re under no obligation to compensate us. It wasn’t your fault.” The reply I got: “Our fault or not, you were inconvenienced. We want to do something to make up for that.”

So I was delighted to read Cody’s account of jetBlue’s word-of-mouth campaign that involves the installation of “story booths” in major airports jetBlue serves. According to Cody:

“At the futuristic-looking booths, a virtual jetBlue crew member will guide passengers as they enter their stories. There will also be simple postcards handed out and mailed to JetBlue customers asking them to share their experience stories.”

I’d do that. I’d sit in that booth and tell my story. Since the campaign includes using the war stories of real travelers, my tale could end up as part of a TV commercial or some other formal communication.

Cody stacks this concept against the popular and typical celebrity endorsement approach. In an era where (as the Edelman Trust Barometer has shown) people trust others like them more than they trust institutions, it makes sense to have road warriors like you tell stories that will make you want to use the same service.

A Brandweek story has more detail on the campaign:
http://www.brandweek.com/bw/news/leisuretrav/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002275345

Steve Cody’s post:
http://www.repmanblog.com/repman/2006/05/why_wordofmouth.html

4. Customer Service on the Edge

Companies that listen to bloggers have a unique opportunity to improve their reputations and win converts to their business models. Listening, after all, is a critical element of communication, but one that most organizations employing traditional communication practices often ignore.

A case in point arises from an item I posted to my blog. In that post, I complained that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 flagged potential phishing sites, then made it difficult under some circumstances for innocent sites to get excluded from the list. The site that generated the phising warning was a membership directory for a religious congregation. The database-diriven directory is password protected (as you might expect) and will provide far greater flexibility and currency than the paper directory distributed to congregants every other year. Among the directory features is a form members can use to update their own information in the database, such as a change of address. That’s the feature, I suspect, that brought up the phishing red flag. As my earlier post documented, my interaction with Microsoft to have the warning removed was frustrating.

I was surprised —- but also delighted —- to see the first comment on that post came from Dean, who listed his URL as the Microsoft IE developers blog. HIs comment: “Ouch. that surprises me. I’ll see what I can do. Thanks for writing up the feedback.”

The next day I received another email from Microsoft: “After further investigation, we have fixed the rating per your feedback. Due to client caching, you may continue to see warnings on the site for up to 24 hours. “

In case you didn’t catch it, they fixed the rating per my feedback. I don’t think they revisited my original email. I believe it was Dean’s review of my post that led to the outcome I was looking for. Next time, rather than simply complain, I may take a somewhat different approach with a blog post, positioning it as a request for customer service.

This is consistent with a theme I’ve been hearing with increasing frequency: the notion of content on the “edge.” Most content is aggregated and controlled in a central place, from customer service (you have to call the company) to classified advertising (you place the ad in the newspaper or on eBay). New models, though, suggest that you keep control of your content on your own space and through tags and other identification techniques, the service providers identify it and respond. That’s the idea behind Edgeio, which lets you post your classifieds on your own blog with appropriate tags; the ad then is listed on Edgeio’s categorized ad listing site. BlogBurst syndicates content from participating bloggers on sites like the Houston Chronicle and the Washington Post. Corante’s hubs take existing content on specific topics (like marketing) from participating bloggers, offering access to it through the hub and commenting on it on its own blog.

So why not customer service? Rather than simply complain about a company, why couldn’t the company develop tags that designate the post a customer service request. You would blog the issue—possibly on a blog you set up just for classified advertising and customer support—and tag it a customer service request; different tags could designate different types of issues…one for technical support, one for sales issues, and so on. You post and tag your problem and someone from the company responds via comment on your blog.

Of course, offering a service like this would be pointless if companies didn’t provide the resources to ensure customer issues are addressed and resolved. Most companies with reputation problems would be in much better shape if thei provided breathtaking service to their customers. But as way to handle customer service that puts the service request on the “edge” and takes advantage of the strengths of the Web 2.0 platform, it’s an idea I like. And, if the Microsoft is any example, it’s one that could work.

Anyway, I’m back to using IE7 virtually all the time and my esteem for Microsoft has been bumped up a notch.

Edgeio:
http://www.edgeio.com

Blogburst:
http://www.blogburst.com

5. Virtual Meetings Gain Steam…Just Not in Business

The blogosphere has been abuzz with the news that Skype has finally released its long-awaited SkypeCast service. In case you hadn’t heard, SkypeCast lets Skype users conduct online meetings with up to 100 people from anywhere in the world for free. Skype has teamed up with SixApart and other companies to create this capability, which many have taken advantage of even in its first few days of beta testing. As I write this, there are about 100 Skypecasts scheduled; some of those already held have included an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting for people who can’t make it to meetings. USA Today writer and blogger Kevin Maney thinks his band can perform a concert using a SkypeCast. Corante held several Skypecasts featuring interviews and Q&A with speakers from its upcoming marketing conference.

The same capabilities have been around for years for those willing to pay phone companies and conference hosting services to host them. The ability to do it for free can save companies bundles of cash—yet among those 160 or so SkypeCasts scheduled, I didn’t see one from a business. Admittedly, I didn’t scrutinze the list that closely, but if there were any, they were certainly among the minority.

This is no surprise. Big business is notoriously slow adopting new technologies, which is why I don’t expect to see corporate meeting rooms or conference centers set up any time soon in Second Life, even though it seems like a no-brainer to me. Podcasting innovator Adam Curry has built a castle in the popular metaverse and is inviting listeners to drop by whenever he happens to be “home.” His listeners hail from all four corners of the globe and many would love the opportunity to get together with him. Now they can, even if what they see is his avatar.

All this will sound familiar to fans of Neal Stephenson’s classic “Snow Crash,” where the word “metaverse” was introduced. Second Life comes hauntingly close to Stephenson’s vision; add 3D goggles and the ability to control your movements without a keyboard and Stephenson’s vision will be realized.

In Second Life, you can purchase real estate with Linden Dollars you buy with your real dollars. So why shouldn’t a company buy some land, build a conference center, and invite globally dispersed employees to gather for a conference or a meeting? Why shouldn’t IABC charge admission for a daylong event with speakers and presentations?

Some smaller organizations are figuring out, according to a BusinessWeek story by Rob Hof:

Justin Bovington, chief executive of the London marketing firm Rivers Run Red, for instance, uses Second Life as a virtual meeting place where ads, posters, and other designs can be viewed in 3D settings by clients and partners around the world in real time. That saves the weeks it would take to shuttle physical materials back and forth.

Wells Fargo has created Stagecoach Island in Second Life, a place where Second Lifers can play games that teach them about finance “while hanging out with friends.” That’s a great marketing ploy; I’m waiting to hear that Wells Fargo’s next worldwide controller’s meeting will take place in Second Life.

Until then, what about Global PR Blog Week III? We could hold it on PR Island, where the sun always shines and the water is always warm.

6. Trust in Leadership is Worth Half a Million

Regular readers will know that I believe senior leadership communication is a vital element of internal communications at all times, whether significant change is occurring or not. I’ve received two more pieces of evidence to support this notion.

Angela Sinickas sends along the first in the form of research by Warren Shepell, a global leader in employee assistance programs. According to the firm’s research, seven things are required for maximizing employee engagement. At the top of the list, according to the research: “Trust in senior managers.” Trust in supervisors was high up on the list, weighing in at number four. Ranking above that, at number three, though, was, “Understand their organizations’ vision and strategic direction,” just the kind of big-picture issue senior leadership would communicate; supervisors would interpret that information to localize it and help employees understand how those big-picture vision and strategic direction will affect their work.

The second research study comes by way of Malcolm Ruddock, director, Employee and Advancement Communications at Canada’s University of Western Ontario. Ruddock forwards along an item appearing on the website of the Vancouver Board of Trade regarding research conducted by John Helliwell, one of the world’s foremost researchers on people’s happiness and well-being.

To illustrate his results, Helliwell put a dollar figure to give a recognizable value to how important certain factors are to well-being. Factors measured were engagement (how connected people are with others); employment (paid or not); family, friends and neighbours; good health; high quality of government at all levels, and adequate income (relative to expectations).

Trust toward management was worth more than any other single factor, whether at work or at home, worth half a million dollars in Helliwell’s dollar-valuation equation, “when the most-trustworthy and least-trustworthy managements are being compared. This shows that even a modest change in workplace trust relations can significantly affect life satisfaction.” That half-million stacks up against the $125,000 it’s worth to have more time with family and $100,000 to have more time with friends.

Don’t let anybody convince you that there’s no value to leader communication.

7. Business Blogs in Regulated Companies

At the Ragan Corporate Communicators conference -— and again with a Chicagoland client with whom I met following the conference —- I heard an objection raised to business blogs that I’ve heard before. How can a company blog when it functions in a regulated environment? In fact, a communicator with a financial services company noted that, in addition to federal regulatory oversight, the company is also subject to distinct regulations in each of the states where it does business.

This objection to business blogging is a far more reasonable and thoughtful one that those I usually encounter (e.g., we’ll lose control of the message, we don’t want negative comments on our own company site, etc.). However, there is an answer: Don’t blog about anything that is covered by the regulations to which you are subject.

At the Ragan conference, I spoke with a communicator working for a pharmaceutical company. Having worked for a pharma before myself, I could easily relate to her concerns. In the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not allow a company to make any claims about a drug that do not reflect the FDA’s approval for the drug. Here’s an example: When I worked for Allergan, we could discuss Botox only in terms of the indications for which it had been approved at that time: strabismus and blepharospasm. While cosmetic surgeons were injecting their patients with Botox as a means of smoothing out wrinkles, we couldn’t talk about that. Doctors can prescribe drugs for anything they want, but we could not talk about a drug’s potential benefits for anything other than its approved indications—and even then only within the scope of the FDA’s approval. That is, even when discussing strabismus, for example, we couldn’t talk about any benefits of the drug that were not addressed in the approval, even if our clinical trials and shown them to be valid.

The concern, then, is that a blog could wind up referencing something outside the scope of the limited FDA approval. While the company representative writing the blog might be careful enough to avoid any such references, something could slip by in a comment, too subtle to be noticed in a review but still available to any regulator looking to catch the company in a violation of the rules.

This argument against blogging for regulated companies, though, supposes that a company blog has to focus on products and services covered by regulations. I suggested to the pharma communicator that a company selling diabetes products, for example, could host a blog called “Living with Diabetes.” There is no need to talk about the company’s product. The blog could talk about diet and exercise and other lilfestyle considerations, examine new research, interview diabetes sufferers, and cover a host of other topics without ever making any claims about any drugs. Further, company blogs can address non-consumer issues, such as the world of pharma R&D (e.g., what it takes to get any drug from research to pharmacies), the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and universities, what it takes to recruit research scientists…the possiblities are endless without ever stepping over the bounds into content that would attract the eye of regulators.

What a company blogs about, ultimately, should be driven by a strategic planning process that identifies issues and audiences that can best be addressed through a blog.

8. Workplace Surfing: Is the Tide Starting to Turn?

From the unlikeliest of places, a challenge has been mounted to the knee-jerk management belief that workplace Internet surfing represents a dire productivity problem. While companies like Websense have reaped the rewards of their fearmongering, a New York administrative law judge saw it differently today when he recommended the lightest punishment possible in the case of a city worker who surfed the Net at work despite warnings not to.

Administrative Law Judge John Spooner just didn’t think it was that big a deal when he said:

“It should be observed that the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for their work.”

Spooner, who recommended only a reprimand, pointed out that the city lets workers make personal phone calls so long as it doesn’t affect their performance. In the AP article I read, there was no reference to Spooner pointing out the benefits open web access can bring to a company. But I’m still delighted to see this official and authoritative recognition that the web isn’t the workplace demon Websense would have executives believe it is.

(According to an article in the Boston Herald, “research” by Salary.com suggests that web surfing in the workplace, along with water cooler chit-chat and personal phone calls and errands, cost companies $759 billion per year. This is the kind of scare tactic I’m talking about, presented strictly to draw business to the services companies like Websense and Salary.com provide. These numbers are arrived at by (a) selecting a dollar amount to represent the cost of employing a worker per hour, (b) determining the number of hours spent surfing the web, chatting with colleagues (that is, engaging in knowledge transfer), and running errands, and (c) multiplying a times b. It’s an absurd number that defies logic, since it does not account for the hours spent at home engaged in work activities or the number of hours these employees spend at the office beyond the required eight hours. The real measure is whether work is getting done on time and whether it’s quality work. Period. It still amazes me that these outfits get a free pass on these numbers despite US Department of Labor statistics that continue to show workplace productivity increasing. I keep wondering when somebody in the mainstream press is going to call Websense and Salary.com and their ilk out on these insipid studies.)

The 14-year Department of Education veteran could have been fired for his transgression. Some organizations never let it get that far; they simply block employees from even making the effort. That is, you’re blocked from doing the equivalent, in Judge Spooner’s estimation, of making a phone call or reading the paper.

According to the New York Daily News, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is miffed:

“You’re supposed to be working during the work day. The taxpayers are paying you to work. It is not unreasonable to expect you to work…If you are spending hours on the Internet, yes, I think it is inappropriate. Why on Earth do you think you’re hired? Do you think your boss would let you do that? I don’t think so. “

In the hearing, though, it was revealed that no work was backed up and that no calls were going unanswered. One has to wonder if the employee in question was taking work home, using his own computer to perform it, or he was working any hours beyond those required by his contract. I know I keep beating the same drum, but work-life integration is a fact of life for knowledge workers these days. Employers need to get up to speed on the concept if they hope to engage the workforce and improve overall performance.

I don’t expect this ruling to have any immediate or significant impact on most companies’ policies, not while Websense releases studies that manipulate numbers to give workplace surfing the appearance of a productivity catastrophe. But every journey begins with a single step, and Judge Spooner’s may be the one that sets this journey in motion.

9. Do Corporations Need Blog Monitors?

I was taken aback by an item in The Blog Herald that was inspired by an item in Stowe Boyd’s blog. Stowe wrote:

“I think it is more likely that a role analogous to press relations will arise: blog relations. These folks will keep tabs on Blogpulse and Technorati, to see what is going down, but they will also maintain and active and on-going relationship with the major bloggers in their sector.”

Matt Craven, who wrote the Blog Herald item, responds by noting that he is aware of several companies following this pattern. He cites one Fortune 500 company that sends its execs a daily intelligence report gleaned from Buzzmetrics, and another using several sources (Bloglines, PubSub, Technorati and Feedster) to monitor keywords, assembling the results into daily intelligence and “pulse” information.

All of which is great; I’ve been advising clients and audiences to start monitoring the blogosphere for a couple of years now. My question is whether blog monitoring needs to be a discrete function in the organization or whether blogs should simply be added to the monitoring mix. Public relations academics refer to “environmental scanning” as the gathering of intelligence about publics and environmental forces:

“These activies are conceptually distinct from performance control feedback, program adjustment feedback, and organizational adaption feedback…These feedback loops are conceptual representations in an open-systems model of the three types of program evaluation that practitioners use to measure the preparation, implementation, and impact of public relations programs. Scanning research is different…Such research is exploratory in nature…The strategic function of scanning is early detection of emerging problems as well as quantification of existing or known problems in the environment.”

— Excellence in Public Relations and Communications Management

In other words, companies that scan the entire environment and aggregate the results to make informed assessments will be far better off than those that compartmentalize their scanning—one person looking at blogs, another looking at media, another looking at activist groups and so on.

How organizations deal with the blogosphere needs to be thought through carefully; there are significant differences between blogger relations and media relations, as Stowe Boyd suggests. How we monitor, though, should be based on a holistic view of the world as it intersects with the organization. We should add blog monitoring to the mix, not create a new function that fails to reconcile the intelligence obtained from the blogosphere with that obtained from the multitude of other channels in which our organizations are fodder for conversation.

10. Site of the Month

Spell with Flickr

Flickr is a treasure trove of material; it’s remarkable what people will take pictures of. For example, people shoot pictures of letters they find on signs. Some folks with a knack for programming have put together a little application that lets you type in the letters you want, then snatches those letters from Flickr and assembles them in your order. Don’t like one of the letters? Click it and the app will find a different one.

http://metaatem.net/words/

11. HC+T update

I’m presenting at the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) conference. My primary session takes place the final day of the conference, June 7, but I’m also on a panel on Sunday, June 4.
I’m wrapping up the final two intranet audits of the five I’ve been working on.
I’m presenting an update on the role of social media in communications at two financial services institutions later in June.

11. Boilerplate and subscription information

You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!

HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader.

Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

(C) 2006, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.

Posted by Shel on 05/29 at 05:08 AM
(0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Saturday, April 08, 2006

HC+T Update: April 2006

The April 2006 email newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology, in blog/RSS format.

HC+T Update

April 2006

Yep. You’re Out There
The Blurring Line Between Internal And External Communications
Why Are Intranets Stagnant?
Podcasting: What’s In A Name
New Webinar on CEO Communication—And New Site!
Who’s Number One?
More Evidence Supports CEO Communication
Old Tools Still Matter
Site of the month
HC+T update
Boilerplate and subscription information

As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog over the past month. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. Yep. You’re Out There

Last month, I wondered if anyone was reading “HC+T Update,” since I hadn’t heard from a single reader when the February issue didn’t appear. Turns out, yeah, you’re out there! About 100 of you responded with pleas to continue producing the newsletter. Most of the responses noted that you read it when it arrives, but don’t notice when it doesn’t.

Some of you also indicated you don’t read blogs so reading mine (from which all of this content is derived) isn’t an option.

So I’ll definitely continue with “HC+T Update.” But I do want to stress my firm belief that email newsletters will be dead in 2-3 years. I know for a fact that several hundred subscribers to “HC+T Update” don’t get it because spam filters catch it. All communicators would be far better off getting an RSS news reader and subscribing to the RSS feed for this newsletter. It’s an opportunity to learn how to use a reader (which will be built into Internet Explorer 7 when it’s released and is already a part of Firefox and Safari). Since you’ll need to use RSS to communicate in the next few years—really, you’ll NEED to know how to use RSS—it’ll be an opportunity to get up to speed.

I’m happy to help anybody who needs some assistance getting up and running with a news reader. Just drop me a line to mailto:shel.holtz@gmail.com. Again, I’m suggesting you subscribe to the feed for this newsletter, not every item in my blog!

Thanks to everyone who answered my query, and thanks so much for being a reader!

2. Why Are Intranets Stagnant?

The evolution of the World Wide Web over the last five years has been nothing short of astounding. Intranets, on the other hand, haven’t progressed an inch since, oh, say 2001. While the web has witnessed the wide-scale adoption of social networking and the early stages of true web-based applications (like Writely and AjaxWrite), the intranet of 2006 looks pretty much the same as it did five years ago.

I know because intranet audits are a staple of my consultancy. I see a lot of intranets, and have since…well, since before the word “intranet” was adopted. I’m working on three of these audits at this moment. And although there are plenty of fine features and functionality, there is little to suggest intranet teams are adopting the characteristics of the “read-write” web.

Sure, blogs and wikis are finding their way onto intranets, but the number of companies employing these social computing tools is a bare fraction of the total number of intranets functioning today. As for the other elements of Web 2.0, I’m aware of less than a handful of intranets that have embraced notions like social tagging (as exemplified by del.icio.us (although I have heard of two companies taking initial steps in this direction), audience ranking (along the lines of Digg and Memeorandum, social networks ( like LinkedIn, file sharing services like Flickr and YouTube or AJAXish tools like PageFlakes (which has become my default home page).

All of these utilities make perfect sense forintranets, and most of them would be simple to implement. Simple, in any case, compared to, say, getting an SAP portal up and running. Social tagging would let employees find intranet content based on bookmarks their colleagues have asigned. One cmpany, for instance, calls its mailroom “Document Delivery Services;” there is no reference to “mailroom” anywhere on the intranet. If one employee found the DDS site and tagged it “mailroom,” other employees would be able to find it by searching the bookmark site for the word that makes the most sense to them.

Digg-like ranking would let employees prioritize company news and information based on what is most important to them. (The company could continue to push news it believes is so important that every employee should see it.) Social networks that emulate the likes of LinkedIn would let employees in large organizations make contact with others who can help with a project or assignment through trusted intermediaries. And personzlied web start pages like PageFlakes and ProtoPage do exactly what web portals do (at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time it takes companies to implement portals like the ones sold by Plumtree and Oracle.

Any of these kinds of services would make intranets infinitely more valuable, compelling, and usable for employees. So why aren’t intranet teams making the slightest move to keep up with developments on the web? There are several factors at play:

IT departments have invested too much time and effort into developing the infrastructure of the current iteration of the intranet and are in no hurry to move in a different direction.
Corporate IT staffs—some of them, anyway—are utterly clueless about what’s happening on the web. They don’t know online AJAX from the kitchen cleanser.
Communicators figure the intranet is working just fine the way it is; why fix what isn’t broken?
Corporate communicators—many of them—are utterly cluelessa bout what’s happening on the web. They wouldn’t know what Digg was even if they’d been dug.
Too much of an investment has been made in the existing portals that haven’t produced the kind of results most companies hoped for
The existing intranet hasn’t lived up to expectations in the first place; why invest time and effort in it now?
Most companies are struggling to retain a command-and-control structure for their intranets. Tools that put control into employees’ hands are antithetical to intranets where only authorized representatives of the company can contribute content.

There are, I’m sure, other obstacles standing in the way of intranet evolution. There are also, I’m sure, some intranets somewhere that have undertaken efforts to adopt some of these tools. I haven’t seen them; have you? Intranet teams should start taking a hard look at their stagnant intranets and how they can be improved—to the benefit of the organization through enhanced productivity —- using the many elements that make up the read-write web.

3. The Blurring Line Between Internal And External Communications

Regardless of the other communication disciplines I have practiced—media relations, financial communications, corporate PR, the list goes on—I have always maintained employee communications as part of my portfolio. I believe deeply in the power of effective internal communications. The Globe and Mail made a point yesterday of reporting a Watson Wyatt Worldwide study that linked employee communications to bottom-line performance:

“Shareholder returns for organizations with the most effective communications were 57 per cent higher than returns for firms with less effective communications over the past five years. The survey…also found that the best communicators had a 19.4-per-cent higher market premium—the extent to which the market value of a company exceeds the cost of its assets—than the less effective communicators.”

There’s more support for a strong internal communications effort in the study and the Globe and Mail report.

However, a couple of items in the blogosphere recently have had me pondering the positioning of employee communications within the organization.

My friend Ron Shewchuk wrote a post for the IABC Employee Communications Common that asked just that question:

“I’m particularly interested in whether internal communicators should report directly to Human Resources, or if it’s better to have a “dotted line” and report through to, say, public affairs.”

The post drew 13 comments—not bad for a relatively new blog. Some took this position: “Since employee communications addresses the needs of all the employees in a company, it should report to the sole department responsible for all these people — HR.” Others vote for Corporate Communications. (Read the thread for details.)

I’ve had both experiences. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t report to either. I’d report directly to the CEO. There’s plenty of support for this relationship. In the real world, however, there are few CEOs who would happily add another direct reporting relationship to their plates.

I don’t buy the argument that HR deals with employees exclusively and therefore employee communications belongs in HR. In my experience, far too often HR sees employee communications as an HR communications function, focused on compensation, benefits, policies, and other HR-centric issues. Once you try to communicate anything outside the scope of HR’s jurisdiction, they get very nervous. In today’s world, that can be exceedingly dangerous. (That’s why, in many large organizations, HR maintains its own communicators, distinct from the general employee communications teams.)

Which brings us to the second bit of blogospheric buzz to capture my attention. In the wake of Microsoft’s announcement that Windows Vista would be delayed until January 2007, there has been quite a bit of discussion about the role of employee bloggers. I loved Robert Scoble’s characterization of employee bloggers as being “at the edge of a company.”) Robert insisted he was an official Microsoft spokesperson through his blog; so was any other Microsoft employee blogger, because the blogs are public and his remarks can be quoted by the media.

In comments to Neville Hobson’s blog, I suggested that the issue isn’t one of a blogger’s credibility, but rather of his authority. If 10 or 20 employee bloggers voice their diverse and varied opinions about a company issue—and in the course of their discussions articulate subtly (or not-so-subtly) different information, which one reflects the authoritative statement of record for the organization?

The question of where authority resides is an intriguing one. Inhis post, Robert suggested that he can be the authoritative source…sometimes. Which, exactly, are those times? It depends, Robert says, on whether he’s remarking on his own projects or team efforts, or if he’s simply opining about other company issues. Of course, Robert doesn’t tag his posts as “authoritative” and “non-authoritative;” nor does anyone else. It’s up to the reader to deduce that.

While we wrestle with these issues as we journey farther into the era of social computing, there is one thing companies can do to ensure accurate information is presented to various external publics: They can communicate more effectively internally, providing accurate information and access to details that will help those employees who blog (or otherwise engage in the great conversation) avoid making any mistakes. In other words, internal communcations is having a greater and greater effect on external communications.

Given that, how much additional emphasis do companies need to place on employee communications, and where should it reside? Too often, the answer comes down to politics. Wherever your internal communications department sits in the org chart, though, you’d better make sure there’s a strong tie to the external team and that messages are clear, consistent, accurate, thorough and candid. If not, this new era of social computing could reach up and bite your company in the ass.

4. Podcasting: What’s In A Name?

A mini brouhaha has erupted over a report from Bridge Data that “reveals” most people who retrieve podcasts don’t transfer them to their portable digital media devices. According to the study, more than 80% of podcasts are played directly from the PC. Blogging about this, Colin Dixon and Michael Greeson of TDG Research suggest:

“We find ourselves in a bit of pickle: either (a) our definition of podcasting is insufficient or inaccurate, or (b) 80% of those who we call “podcasters” are nothing of the sort.”

Steve Rubel also weighed in, saying, “It seems like some people are calling programs podcasts that really aren’t.”

I think I need to start a new category on this blog called “Take a deep breath.” It would certainly apply to this post. Why is a deep breath needed? Two points. First, I believe the 80% number is being misinterpreted. Second, who gives a damn?

The first point: It’s not that 80% of podcasts aren’t available for subscription. It’s that 80% of the downloads of podcasts aren’t available for transfer to an iPod. It’s that 80% of the people who download any given podcast, for whatever reason, aren’t opting to transfer it to a portable device. (Podcasters are the people producing the podcast, not the people listening.)

But it’s not even the portability of the audio file that makes it a podcast. After all, you could do that with an audio file well before podcasting was introduced. it’s the ability to subscribe via RSS that makes it a podcast. While the TDG post refers to the Oxford dictionary’s definition, I prefer Wikipedia’s: “Podcasting is the distribution of audio or video files, such as radio programs or music videos, over the Internet using either RSS or Atom syndication for listening on mobile devices and personal computers.” Note that the RSS distribution is referenced before the portability.

Even with that, many people opt to download podcast files directly from a site rather than subscribing. Looking at the LibSyn stats for my own podcast, I can see that just under half of the retrievals of the files come from direct downloads instead of subscriptions. I have no idea how many are listening to the stream we make available. But even if more than half don’t subscribe, and most of them listen at their computer, does that mean it’s not a podcast?

Of course not. And that’s the second point. The fact that the podcast can be retrieved via RSS subscription and can be transferred to an MP3 player makes it a podcast. How people choose to get and listen to one is entirely up to them. I’m working on a podcasting project with a client. One of the requirements I set for the effort is to ensure the podcast can be subscribed to, downloaded directly, and streamed, giving the control to the listener so they can exercise their personal preferences.

And let’s not forget that podcasting isn’t even two years old. Any number of reasons could account for the slow uptake of the RSS and portability characteristics of podcasts: Confusion about subscribing, failure to understand the portability issue, the convenience of listening at the computer immediately after downloading, already-formed PC-listening habits, the list goes on.

So rather than get hung up on semantics, let’s stay focused on the potential for the medium. Okay? Now, everybody, exhale…

5. New Webinar on CEO Communication—And New Site!

My Webinar business (web-based workshops) has been quiet for a few months as it undergoes some significant change. I’ve extended my partnership with Lawrence Ragan Communications, resulting in the relocation of Webinars from my own server to Ragan’s, using a content management system, a simpler registration process, and more integrated Webinar elements (the message board is more tightly integrated with the lectures, for instance).

I’m the lecturer for the first Webinar using this new system. The topic: CEO communications. The Webinar will cover how CEOs should communicate with employees, in general, during times of change, and in support of organizational initiatives. The role of the communication department will be examined, including recommendations on how to get the CEO to listen to your advice and what to do if the CEO just isn’t a great communicator.

The Webinar begins Monday, May 1. You can get details and register here:

http://www.raganwebinars.com/ME2/Sites/Default.asp

Remember, these are NOT telephone-based sessions! All Webinar activity takes place on the Web; they are primarily text-based. If you’re expecting a teleseminar with web-based PowerPoint slides (what some people CALL webinars), this isn’t that.

The next Webinar will feature a primer on podcasting!

6. Who’s Number One?

In the March/April issue of Journal of Employee Communication Management (a print publication; subscribers have access to online articles), my good friend Steve Crescenzo questions the notion of companies prioritizing audiences.

Steve often ponders things that never occur to anyone else. This tendency comes from a combination of creativity, stress, and alcohol. As for his musing about ranking audiences, Steve wrote:

“I just think it’s dangerous to start ranking and prioritizing your different audiences or stakeholders. It’s sort of like a parent favoring one child over another. If customers are always first, who’s second? Do employees come before shareholders? Where do your distributors fit in? Outside contractors? Wha about the board of directors, or your lobbyists and legislators? If you’re putting one group first, that must mean you’re putting another group last.

“And there’s another reason the whole ‘customers first’ philosophy irks me. As an employee communications guy, I tend to think that if you are going to start ranking your audiences (and I’m not saying you should), then the employees should come first.”

Steve cites Southwest Airlines, which has always held that employees come first. I remember hearing a tale about retired Southwest CEO Herb Kelleher reacting to a company vision pitch from a PR agency by insisting the agency just didn’t get the essence of Southwest’s vision. In a nutshell, he said, the vision is: “Smiles on faces, butts in seats, money in the bank.” In other words, customers will want to fly Southwest if the company is populated by happy employees. Thus, you start with your employees. I don’t know if the story is true, but it makes me happy to think that it is.

But I don’t think Steve is looking at the prioritization from the right perspective. It is important to rank audiences, and it is important to put customers first. And I say this as a guy who spends a lot of time on employee communications myself. But employee communications isn’t the point. The point is about dealing with crises.

In a crisis, senior management is inclined to panic. Panic begets knee-jerking. Knee-jerk reactions in a crisis can be deadly to a business: “Oh, crap, this is serious! We gotta protect our shareholders or our share price will tank. What do we do?” The answer, most often, is to make a decision with investors in mind that ultimately sinks the company.

That’s precisely what Johnson & Johnson didn’t do when faced with the Tylenol tampering incident back in 1982. For those who are unaware (I figure that’s about six people in the US), someone had laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules with cyanide and then returned the bottles to store shelves. Seven people died as a result of ingesting the capsules. To this day, Johnson & Johnson’s handling of the crisis is a textbook study of effective crisis management. That success was the direct result of the prioritization of audiences.

Johnson & Johnson earned its reputation by pulling all Tylenol from store shelves. The cost to the company was enormous. The recall of 31 million bottles of Tylenol cost the company $100 million. The company also stopped manufacturing Tylenol until they could come up with a method for protecting the contents of the bottles, another huge hit to the company’s bottom line. The company was under no obligation to yank the product—after all, only a few bottles in one region were affected and odds were 99.999% of the people who bought Tylenol wouldn’t die of cyanide poisoning. A kneejerk reaction would have been to keep product on store shelves, protecting sales and profits, while making statements about working with law enforcement to find the culprit. But the company had a printed priority list of stakeholders with customers firmly at the top and investors equally firmly at the bottom. The philosophy was simple: Do the right thing by customers and profits and share value will take care of themselves. During crisis exercises, management put the list into practice. Thus, when the Tylenol scare erupted, management didn’t hesitate to put customers first and pull the product and suspend production until the company could innovate its tamper-resistant bottle.

Following its decision to put customers first, rather than let circumstances and panic dictate the decision, the company’s share price fell seven points. Before the action, Johnson & Johnson owned 35% of the non-prescription pain reliever market. Without the product on store shelves, that percentage dropped to 8%. Investors could not have been happy. But because the company’s decision bolstered its reputation among consumers, it didn’t take long to regain its market share after the tamper-proof bottles were introduced. It exceeded its previous market share shortly after that.

J&J’s credo is explicit: “We believe our first responsibility is to doctors, nurses and patients, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services.” Next are employees, followed by communities, and finally by stockholders.

That’s right: Employees come second in the company’s ranking. It’s a sound approach —- one that led the company through a crisis that could have doomed any organization with different priorities —- or worse, no priorities at all. It doesn’t mean employees don’t matter. It does guide decision making that can mean life or death for an organization.

7. More Evidence Supports CEO Communication

As noted in item number 5, the next Shel Holtz Webinar focuses on CEO communication. I’m really happy about doing this Webinar, since it’s something I believe in so strongly. I feel it necessary to offset the beliefs of some communication consultants that employing the CEO to communicate with frontline employees during times of change is a waste of time, money, and effort. I’m always delighted to find research to contradict this belief. I’ve found plenty, and use my blog to spotlight it. Like these:

If you reject all the other research and rationale for CEOs to communicate with employees —- especially during times of change and stress -— you should pay attention to the recently released “Return on Reputation” survey. Hill & Knowlton released the study, conducted by MORI, revealing how financial analysts view corporate reputation management. As much as you may dislike the amount of power financial analysts wield over organizations, that power is very real. And analysts expect CEOs to communicate with their employees.

The authors of the study found it “unsurprising” that analysts need to lead organizational change (an opinion held by 76% of the analysts responding to the survey).

“Nonetheless the ability to communicate (66%) and motivate employees (60%) are also important factors which perhaps too many senior executives ignore to their detriment.”

Another strong piece of evidence tipping the scales in support of direct leader communication with employees. I wouldn’t want to be the CEO of a company that got a negative analyst recommendation because I was listening to the voices arguing that leader communication with employees is a waste of time.

But wait. There’s more.

For reasons I cannot imagine, I was been assigned to judge the “Electronic and Digital Communication - Skills” entries at the IABC Gold Quill Blue Ribbon Panel. Among the entries I reviewed was one from a well-known global company with many tens of thousands of employees. The company is going through evolutionary change wrought by global markets, new technologies, and new demands from existing customers. Communicating the change to employees has been high on the list of priorities for the company’s internal communicators, who conducted employee research to help them craft the efforts. A key bit of research that drove a major decision (and led to the Gold Quill entry) as described in the work plan:

“A majority of employees wanted to learn more about (the company’s) goals and direction, and they wanted to hear this information from the CEO.”

It’s important to understand the nature of this company: The vast majority of employees are unionized, blue-collar laborers. Yet they wanted to hear about the company’s goals and direction from the top. Yet more evidence that the CEO plays a pivotal role in communications within an organization.

8. Old Tools Still Matter

To hear some people, you’d think business should abandon traditional communication channels and dive into social computing to deliver its messages and address its issues. The audience, we are told, has no interest in being talked to; we must, at all costs, accommodate a growing desire among the audience to be engaged in conversation.

I do believe in the conversation and the shift to a social computing environment and all the consequences for business and communications. However, nothing changes everything and I’ve maintained for years that the new tools should be added to the old, not replace them.

Validation came while I was reading my hard copy of the March 20 BusinessWeek. (That’s right, I still get a dead-tree copy in the mail every week. It’s easier to read that way, particularly in the bathroom.) The article that struck me: “Why the Web is HItting a Wall” (paid subscription required). The article by Roger Crockett reports on a Parks Associates survey that reveals 39 million American households do not have Internet access —- meaning only 64% of households do. (And only a small percentage of these read blogs or listen to podcasts!)

The study broke down the reasons why so many Americans are avoiding the Net. It’s a knee-jerk reaction to assume they’re all just getting what they need at work. In fact, that rationale accounts for only 31% of nonusers, according to the study. Sixty percent of people over 65 aren’t connected. There are 6 million homes with PCs but no Internet connection, and most of them wouldn’t subscribe to Net access at any price. Another million say they’re not interested in “anything” on the Net.

Analysts anticipate the total online US population will only reach 67% by 2009. The bottom line is simple: Abandon traditional methods of communication for social media and you also abandon 36% of the total consumer market. Sadly, rather than shift all your efforts to social media, you’ll just have to allocate the resources to do both.

9. Sites of the month

PodBop

Two things will accelerate the uptake of podcasting. One is ease of use. The other is innovative podcasts to which people will want to subscribe. From the second category, I’m anxious to see more services like PodBop.

The idea behind PodBop is simple. Type in the name of your city and you’ll be presented with a list of musicians who are playing live there over the next week or so. You can listen to MP3 files of each band. Better yet, just subscribe to the RSS feed for that city and each week you’ll get a sampling of music from bands playing locally in the days ahead. You can listen at your leisure and decide if you want to take in a show.

According to the site’s information page, PodBop works using the API from Eventful, pulling tagged events into its own database. As for the MP3s, “They are direct links to MP3s hosted on band and record label websites. Much like music blogs do. We can’t imagine why they would have a problem with us using their file sources (they are available for download anyway, plus it’s free promotion).” Well, that could be a problem, I suppose, if the RIAA decided to make an issue out of it. The site does have a link for artists to request links be removed.

But conceptually, PodBop (no pun intended) rocks. The idea of a weekly sampling of music available live in your town fills a need that no technology accommodated before podcasting. I’ve subscribed to the San Francisco feed.

http://www.podbop.org

An Elegant Use of Flash

I still maintain the vast majority of Flash implementations on the web are awful. They take too long to load, they inhibit your ability to get to the information that brought you to the website in the first place, and they add nothing to the information the site conveys. But there are exceptions.

I ran across this elegant animation reading my feeds today. Beginning on March 20, 2003, it shows chronologically the casualties incurred on troops fighting in Iraq. As the calendar zips from day to day, month to month, year to year, the dots continue to spread, conveying in heart-aching clarity the real toll the conflict has taken.The animation runs at 10 frames per second, one frame representing a day. A single black dot indicates the location where a military fatality occurred. An accompanying “tick” sound represents a single casualty.

The map is interactive—you can deselect countries and add location names to the map. Credit for the project goes to designer Tim Klimowicz, who has some other impressive efforts under his belt.

I don’t show this example to make any political point whatsoever, but rather as an example of how Flash can be put to good use to convey quantitative information visually using the dimensions of time and space. It shouldn’t be a great stretch to figure out how to use this approach to represent iPod sales over time and by region—or any other dramatic incursion of a thing or meme into geographic regions.

http://www.obleek.com/iraq/index.html

IABC Conference Blog and Podcast

IABC has launched its official conference blog, “In Session,” and an associated podcast, “ConferenceCast.” Several IABC members and staff will author the blog leading up to and continuing through the June 4-7 conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The podcast will feature interviews with speakers, staff, conference organizers, and some members planning on attending. The podcast will provide insights, information, and updates on the conference. And guess who’s hosting it? IABC asked Neville Hobson and me to produce and co-host the podcast. The first episode is up. I recorded interviews with Gold Quill Awards Blue Ribbon Panel judges during the annual judging session in March, and I think I did a heck of an editing job. I’d value any feedback you may have.

http://blogs.iabc.com/ic

10. HC+T update

It must be audit season. I’m conducting four (count ‘em, four) intranet audits for companies large and small.
Demand for “Writing for the Wired World” continues. I’m conducting the daylong workshop for a company in Minneapolis later this month.
I’m in the midst of managing a blogger relations program for a high-tech startup. The application is very cool—a way to give users control over online video, to let producers create start points within the video, and for individuals to engage in a conversation about the video. I don’t usually work for very small companies and startups, but I’m sold on this product, called Click.TV. Take a look—http://click.tv.

11. Boilerplate and subscription information

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(C) 2006, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.

Posted by Shel on 04/08 at 07:53 AM
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Wednesday, March 15, 2006

HC+T Update: March 2006

The March 2006 email newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology, in blog/RSS format.

HC+T Update

March 2006

Is Anybody Out There?
Wal-Mart Called Out For Blogger Relations Campaign
Could Community Wikis Be The Tipping Point?
Marketing Via Wikipedia: Tread With Care
Should The Press Release Live, Die, Or Be Reborn
Internal Communications Suited To Open Source Marketing
Rocketboom Debuts its Commercial
Measuring Blog ROI
Site of the month
HC+T update
Boilerplate and subscription information

As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog over the past month. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. Is Anybody Out There?

It occurred to me about March 3 or 4 that I had not put out a February Update. February was a very busy month, lots of travel, and it just got by me.

What surprised me, though, was that nobody let me know. I have about 5,000 people on the mailing list and, even with spam filters and other obstacles, the newsletter’s getting to a bunch of people. But it seems that nobody missed an issue!

Which leads me to wonder whether I should keep cranking it out. Most of what appears here is from my blog. Are you already reading that?

I’d appreciate the feedback. Drop me a line and let me know if HC+T Update continues to be worthwhile for you.

2. Wal-Mart Called Out For Blogger Relations Campaign

The PR corner of the blogosphere—along with other elements—has been abuzz lately over a New York Times piece that revealed Wal-Mart’s effort to tell its story through the blogosphere.

Wal-Mart historically has avoided public discussion or debate over the practices that have made it a lightning rod for unions and activists, among others. More recently, though, the company has done a turnaround, launching an effort to get its side of the story into the marketplace. Part of that effort involved engaging Edelman, the world’s largest independent public relations agency, to help get the message into the blogosphere, where Wal-Mart and its practices are routine fodder for conversation.

An Edelman representative named Marshall Manson approached bloggers whose writing led him to believe they might be inclined to support Wal-Mart’s perspective. These bloggers were offered occasional emails containing information about which they might be interested in writing. The information was offered a a source of content for their blogs. They received no compensation in exchange for accepting the message and were under no obligation to use the material; in fact, they were asked specifically not to copy and paste the emails verbatim. However, a couple of the bloggers did run the emails word for word. Since a blog should reflect the author’s voice, not somebody else’s, when quoting somebody, bloggers should disclose the source. I always do. These bloggers did not. It was the fact that the same words appeared on more than one blog that led the Times to produce its “expose,” following which many bloggers accused Wal-Mart and Edelman of “astroturfing.”

(Astroturfing refers to the practice of seeding newspapers and other outlets with letters to the editor that appear to come from individuals but in fact the same letter appears under many different names in a variety of newspapers, the result of a centrally coordinated effort.)

Edelman’s effort has come under fire for a variety of reasons, few of which are valid. The campaign has also led to some thoughtful reflection resulting in proposals to improve such efforts in the future.

The specious objections to the campaign come in three flavors:

It is unethical for an organization to appropriate the blogosphere in this manner
It is unfair for savvy companies to take advantage of naive, gullible bloggers
If Wal-Mart wants to participate in the conversation, they should just start their own blogs

Denying organizations a voice in the blogosphere simply by virtue of the fact that they are organizations is ludicrous. Insisting that the only voice they should be permitted is the one articulated from their own blogs is unduly restrictive; circumstances or strategy may preclude a blog for one reason or another. However, as long as organizations are ethical, transparent, and factual, they should not be constrained from employing the same tactics everyone else uses.

In a CNBC “Squawkbox” segment in which I was interviewed last week, the interviewer asked me if the WalMart campaign didn’t somehow compromise bloggers who are viewed as having independent voices. The fact is, few bloggers write solely from the inner workings of their own minds. The content of their posts are derived from material they have acquired from any number of other sources. It could be the mainstream media. It could be other blogs. It could be a review of their RSS feeds, or content they found serendipitously on a website, or something they heard on the radio or saw on TV or discussed with a friend.

I receive emails from bloggers including BL Ochman and Dave Traynor alerting me (and others; these are lists) to posts in which they believe I might be interested. I also get emails from non-bloggers like Judy Gombita who want to alert me to items I might find relevant. None of these individuals work for companies or are representing a client’s point of view. On the other hand, they wouldn’t send something that contradicted their own point of view, either, would they? But, ultimately, who cares? The source of the information isn’t important, once I’ve determined that the source is credible. We bloggers routinely select from this constant stream of information and ideas the material about which we will write. The more fodder, the better.

There’s nothing wrong with some of that information coming from an organization with an agenda as long as they disclose who they are and what their agenda is.

The mainstream media —- also independent -— routinely uses press releases, interviews, and tips from companies and their PR agencies without disclosing the source of every fact. (That would make for long and boring pieces!)

The bottom line is this: If Judy Gombita can send me pointers to articles and information so I can choose to write about it, so can any organization, whether it’s Wal-Mart, Greenpeace, the United Auto Workers, the Jewish Defense League, the World Bank or the Republican Party. All they have to do is adhere to the guidelines Richard Edelman listed on his blog:

Get permission from the blogger to send the information
Be transparent about who you are, on whose behalf you’re sending the information, and why you’re sending it
Disclose any financial arrangements or other quid pro quo
Deliver only honest, accurate, factual information without spin

As for how bloggers use the information, that’s the blogger’s responsibility, not the organization’s or that of its PR counselors.

Still, some legitimate objections have been raised, the most valid of which is that Manson failed to thorougly disclose his affiliation with Edelman. Based on a reading of his email message, I’m certain this was a miscalculation and not a deliberate attempt to deceive; after all, “Edelman” did appear in the message. Manson may have assumed bloggers would understand what that meant. Several have pointed out, however, that they assumed he was an employee of Wal-Mart, which could put a somewhat different spin on the perception readers would have of the message. Others asserted that it didn’t matter.

As disclosure is at the heart of the objections to the campaign, it’s worth looking at advice from Joseph Thornley, of the Canadian PR firm Thornley-Fallis. Thornley suggested that Edelman or Wal-Mart might have headed off the current controversy by setting up a blog to include every single email sent to the bloggers recruited for the effort. I like that idea a lot; it’s similar to the Nokia n90 blogger relations blog, which establishes complete transparency because it’s a publicly accessible blog that lists all the material available to those bloggers who agreed to participate in the product launch’s blogger relations effort.

A-list PR blogger Steve Rubel suggests in an essay that blogger relations should start with building a relationship with the blogger by feeding him or her links that he or she would be interested in but have nothing to do with your employer or client. From there, offer an RSS subscription to your del.icio.us bookmarks, and point out that from time to time you’ll include links from your client. That’s good advice for a long-term relationship, but won’t work if you have a short-term campaign focusing on content covered by bloggers you had never previously considered approaching.

I presume the folks at Edelman are weighing all of these ideas and more. The agency is by no means to be criticized for not incorporating these concepts into tge Wal-Mart campaign. This is all new territory and we’re learning as we go, striving to be ethical and above-board while trying new approaches, identifying gaps, and discarding what doesn’t work.

3. Could Community Wikis Be The Tipping Point?

At the New Communications Forum, pretty much everybody agreed that blogs were no fad, but wikis evoked a less enthusiastic response. Some conference participants shrugged them off as too technical and complex for the average user. Even Wikipedia is revised most frequently by a relatively small group of regulars.

Nobody argues that wikis make it easier to generate web content than working in HTML or a web authoring app like Dreamweaver. All that’s missing from wikis to get people using them is real motivation. A company called Wetpaint just may have found that motivation.

If you own a dog, odds are you love that dog. (Mine’s name is Sasha. She’s a shepherd mix who is as dumb as a post and the sweetest creature alive.) People who are passionate about dogs are likely to take that last step into wikis in order to contribute to WikiFido one of the community wikis Wetpaint has created. Here, you can add your $.02 to community-written topics like becoming a dog owner, dog breeds, puppy training, taking care of Fido and a list of dog resources. You can also add your dog’s picture to the “My Dog is Cuter than Your Dog” or “Ugliest Dog” pages.

WikiFido is just one of the wikis Wetpaint has set up. According to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer article, Wetpaint’s other wikis cover cancer, the XBox 360, Democrats, Republicans, and bird flu. According to the article, the venture capital-backed company operates under a principle that will be familiar to blog readers:

“The most important concept behind Wetpaint is the idea that groups of people working together and sharing information can create more compelling online content than individuals. In other words, two dozen poodle owners will have more interesting things to say than just one. Wetpaint dubs this the ‘collective wisdom of crowds.’”

I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if WikiFido takes off. I would think the XBox and cancer wikis would also have great chances for success, given the numbers of people with intense interest in the topic and the belief that they have knowledge to share.

My only regret is that a startup came up with these ideas instead of a company. Why shouldn’t Purina have created WikiFido? Why couldn’t Merck establish WikiCancer? Sadly, the answer is obvious: The leaders of these organizations are too busy fretting about the potential risks new media poses—or dismissing wikis as a fad or too technical—instead of innovating uses that are low risk and have the potential for high value.

Now it’s just a matter of seeing if wikis targeting topics about which individuals have passion is enough to nudge them over the technical hurdles and get them engaged. I’m betting it will.

4. Marketing Via Wikipedia: Tread With Care

I’m sitting in an airline lounge at Dulles, having just finished a talk on new media to the annual gathering of US Army Public Affairs officers. During the talk, I showed the Wikipedia entry for the US Army and for the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, pointing out that the Army had an opportunity to ensure the content posted there was accurate. I also suggested that Army information not included on Wikipedia could be added.

Here at the airport, checking my feeds, I came upon an article by a PR blogger of whom I’d been unaware, Rohit Bhargava, who writes the “Influential Interactive Marketing” blog, “Reflections on creating compelling marketing, advertising & public relations online.” In the article, Bhargava reflects on a session he attended at the Search Engine Strategies conference at which one of the speakers told of introducing a Wikipedia entry dedicated to a proprietary platform and development environment for a visual programming language from National Instruments. The initial entry was 40 characters long.

“Within 20 minutes, the post had been edited, and now has several pages of dense content on Wikipedia and appears highly on search results on Google for Labview. It is a great example of how marketers can jump start the creation of third party content that ends up being a wonderful selling and marketing tool - assuming you are able to release control and let the greater community take over.”

True enough, and I applaud Jeff Watts from National Semiconductor for the effort. It also raised a red flag, though. First, the powers that be at Wikipedia could identify such an entry as a blatant attempt at marketing and remove it. (The term “podfading”) was removed after someone tried to enter it, even though it has entered the podcasting lexicon.) It’s also easy to trace the IP address of somebody adding or entering an item. That’s what happened to “podfather” Adam Curry when he tried to revise the podcasting entry, making him the target of some unkind publicity.

While I have no doubt some smart PR people will use the idea of new entries in Wikipedia as a guerrilla marketing tactic, I also have no doubt that some clumsy, unprofessional, brainless dolts will apply the same techniques more brutishly, resulting in a backlash and (as so often happens in our business) wind up having the rest of us painted with their brush.

It’s a good idea, but tread carefully if you try it. Make sure your entry adds value to Wikipedia readers, not just to your client.

5. Should The Press Release Live, Die, Or Be Reborn?

Just to prove there’s an abundance of viewpoints on the future of the press release, I’d like to point you to David Meerman Scott‘s opinion. Scott, author of “Cashing In With Content: How Innovative Marketers Use Digital Information to Turn Browsers Into Buyers,” writes in MarketingProfs.com that the future of press releases will require precisely the behavior that has led Amy Gahran and others to insist that the press release is dead.

Let’s review: Amy says most press releases contain no news, are badly written, and drive reporters insane. Reporters consequently hate them, resulting in few getting the ink they were designed to produce. In the world of blogs and other social media, there are better ways to get your news out. Hence, press releases are relics of a bygone era.

Not so, says Scott. He starts by explaining the good old days when press releases were aimed solely at the press.

“Today, savvy marketing professionals use press releases to reach buyers directly. Many marketing and PR people understand that press releases sent over the wires appear in near real time on services like Google News. But very few understand the implication that they must dramatically alter their press-release strategy if they are to maximize the effectiveness of the press release as a channel for directly communicating with consumers.”

Scott suggests the new rules for press releases include this gem that should drive Amy up a wall: “Don’t just send press releases when ‘big news’ is happening; find good reasons to send them all the time..”

I understand where Scott is coming from, but it’s exactly the kind of press release he’s advocating that lends itself better to new media. The press releases I advocate are the ones with real news that reporters and editors still want to get, the ones that become the official statement of record that reporters love to be able to search for and find in online media newsrooms.

Still, it’s interesting to get a point of view that’s diametrically opposed to the “press-release-is-dead” meme that Amy started. What it tells me is that, bankrupt or not, the press release isn’t going anywhere soon—not if advisors like Scott are wielding any influence at all over their clients.

One more note on press releases: Silicon Valley Watcher’s Tom Foremski headlined an item on Monday, “Die! Press Release! Die! Die! Die!” I wanted to ask him what he really thought. I hate it when people sugar-coat their opinions.

“Press releases are nearly useless. They typically start with a tremendous amount of top-spin, they contain pat-on-the-back phrases and meaningless quotes. Often they will contain quotes from C-level executives praising their customer focus. They often contain praise from analysts, (who are almost always paid or have a customer relationship.) And so on…”

Foremski suggests that press releases should be deconstructed into sections and tagged to writers, editors, and publishers can “pre-assemble some of the news stories and make the information useful.” Nifty idea. Getting every company and agency to agree on a standard, on the other hand…

While some may want the “press release is dead” meme to end, the discussion could wind up producing some worthwhile ideas. Tom Foremski had one that I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around. “Deconstruct the press release into special sections,” he suggested, “and tag the information so that as a publisher, I can pre-assemble some of the news story and make the information useful.” His suggestions for sections included a description, C-level quotes, customer quotes, analyst quotes and financial information. “Provide many links inside the press release copy, and also provide a whole page of relevant links to other news stories or reference sources,” Foremski suggested, adding, “And tag everything so that I can pre-assemble my stories.”

Nifty idea, I thought, but getting consistency everyone to adopt a standard will never happen. Anyway, the problem with the press release has nothing to do with form; it’s a question of substance. While reporters will bitch and moan about press releases in general, they will appreciate and use one that contains real news and is well written.

So I didn’t give Foremski’s idea much thought until I saw it implemented. SHIFT Communications’ Todd Defren took a crack at Foremski’s notion, using a month-old press release as a model. Foremski called it a a good example and a great step in the right direction—“Just these simple things already made the news release a lot more useful.” You can view the effort at http://pr-squared.blogspot.com/2006/03/is-this-press-release-of-tomorrow.html

And I agree. Add to that the interactivity companies like PR Newswire and PRWeb are building into press releases (del.icio.us tags, trackback URLs, etc.), and we may really be onto something here.

So I’m in no hurry for the meme to die. I’d rather it continue and produce more results like these. e.

6. Internal Communications Suited To Open Source Marketing

Open source marketing is a great notion, but it’s slow to catch on. Eventually it will become common, but it’s a dramatic a shift from an approach to advertising and marketing that has become entrenched over 50 years. Few high-powered Madison Avenue execs would be excited about the idea of turning their creative over to the person on the street. So while open source marketing has persuasive evangeilists who can point to some brilliant case studies that make us hopeful, we have to realize that these are, for the time being, exceptions and not the rule.

Inside our organizations is another matter altogether.

Internal communicators have been practicing forms of open source marketing for years. In an effort to involve employees, we have solicited their contributions to our communication programs in an amazing variety of ways.

I’ve heard that the benefits videos produced for employee consumption at Southwest Airlines use employees as performers, even in singing-and-dancing bits. I’ve seen more than one internal publication that featured a photo of the month selected from among several submitted by employees. More than one intranet was named in a “name the intranet” contest. Some progressive companies have been known to turn to their employees to craft their vision, mission, and values statements. The list goes on.

These examples of internal open source marketing were not undertaken with open source marketing in mind. Internal communicators always seek to get employees more engaged in the process. After all, employee communication staffs tend to be small and getting employees to contribute helps to stretch the budget. I never held an employee communications position where I didn’t try to cajole employees at non-headquarters locations to write an article for us now and then. If employee communicators DID approach their work with open source marketing in mind, the possibilities for engaging employees in the communication process expand considerably.

Unlike simple contests and solicitation of employee contributions, open source marketing sets the parameters for a communication campaign and turns the creative over to employees. It’s a small but significant step away from what most employee communicators are already doing. Here’s an example:

It’s benefits enrollment season. Your primary challenge for the current year’s campaign: Convince employees enrolled in an expensive medical plan to switch to a cheaper managed care program. These employees perceive that managed care is inferior care. You turn to employees who are already enrolled in the managed care program, and you turn them loose. “Tell us a story about an experience with your healthcare provider,” you ask them. “Any story. Using any medium. Write an article, produce a video, record an audio file, draw a comic strip, we really don’t care HOW you tell the story. Just tell it.” Why would an employee take the time to produce and submit such content? A prize for the best submission as voted by other employees, of course. Or a banquet dinner for all employees who submit an entry. Or some other incentive.

You cull from among the submissions and pick those that best convey the quality of the plan’s managed care provider and turn this into your communication. Written recollections go into your newsletter or onto your intranet (or both). Videos go up on the intranet as a special feature. You can turn some of the submissions into posters, incorporate some into other benefits communication vehicles. The employees’ positive stories about their managed care healthcare experiences becomes the consistent theme of your communications.

That’s just one idea, off the top of my head. Give it some thought and you can probably come up with a half-dozen more uses for open source marketing that your organization could benefit from right now. And unlike the external world, you’re not introducing a true paradigm shift. (Yes, I know, paradigm is a hackneyed word, but its overuse began with a legitimate definition, and a transition from inside-out marketing to outside-out fits the definition.) Internally, everybody’s already positioned to contribute to an open source effort. Internal communicators simply need to build the concept into their communication plans and programs to get the most out of it.

7. Rocketboom Debuts Its Commercial

Funny, isn’t it, that the blogosphere was abuzz when Rocketboom auctioned an ad, but barely a whisper was heard yesterday when the ad debuted at the end of the normal Monday segment. More attention should be paid.

This whole social computing phenomenon is gradually, glacially changing the face of communications, covering the spectrum of advertising, marketing, and public relations, along with all their sub-classes (like investor relations and employee communications). Steve Rubel reported yesterday on a Forrester report on social computing that reached this conclusion:

“To thrive in an era of Social Computing, companies must abandon top-down management and communication tactics, weave communities into their products and services, use employees and partners as marketers, and become part of a living fabric of brand loyalists.”

It’s a great quote, one I’m sure will be cited repeatedly for many months. Yet whenever I sit down to watch television (I just can’t stop watching “24”), I still have to fast-forward through those 30-second spots, the death of which has been (prematurely) proclaimed by so many. (Thank God for TiVo.) Change comes slowly to entrenched institutions, especially when so many different players perpetuate traditional strategies even though their effectiveness may be eroding faster than Santa Monica hillsides during a monsoon. Clients, agencies, producers, media brokers and buyers and television and radio stations represent an infrastructure that won’t easily abandon its bread-and-butter product. It would be like asking an automobile supply chain to suddenly stop making cars and shift to producing Segways.

But anybody involved in communication should watch the first ad on Rocketboom and consider the model the daily newslike video blog has introduced. In case you missed the story—or have forgotten—a company called TRM won the auction. TRM recruits people to sell its ATMs into retail outlets. Part of the deal was that Rocketboom would create the commercials, which would run at the conclusion of each daily episode for a week.

The Rocketboom team has created an episodic ad campaign featuring host Amanda Congdon in a comic strip-like series. As described in We are the Media, a blog dedicated to the “vlogosphere” (dear God, not another osphere):

“Because they are not limited to television’s thirty seconds, they have added subtlety and intruigue and a great narrative story to the advertisements that will make Rocketboom subscribers sit on the edge of their seats waiting for the next days advertisement.”

Equally important is that the ad fits seamlessly with the whole Rocketboom ethos. Regular viewers of Rocketboom will not skip the ad because the ad is part of Rocketboom, not an irrelevant interruption. For $40,000, TRM gets about 100,000 people paying close attention to the ad and, in some cases, even watching it multiple times to pick up on subtle elements that you just won’t catch from a single viewing.

As “We are the Media’s” Bre Pettis points out, the folks at Rocketboom can report with some degree of accuracy how many times the ad has been downloaded. The real test, of course, will be in the number of viewers who become sales agents for TRM. But whether or not TRM meets its goals with the ads (you have to figure these ads would produce better results for a more mainstream product or service), the campaign crystallizes the potential for advertising in the social computing era. The only question is how long it will take for those clients locked into the mainstream advertising world to figure it out.

8. Measuring Blog ROI

Katie Paine has conceded a point to Shel Israel: As cheap as they are to set up and maintain, there’s really no need to measure the ROI of blogs. After all, is it necessary to measure the ROI of your pants? (Shel denies he ever used this analog, but Katie remembers it.)

There’s much to be said of this argument. If a company installs the open-source Wordpress on its own servers, the cost is limited to bandwidth. For $14 a month, a company can have the top-tier Typepad service without concern for bandwidth use. When measured against cost, it doesn’t take much to justify. One minor positive outcome can tip the scales and rationalize the cost of the blog.

It’s even easy to extend the “pants” argument to higher costs, as Toby Ward does when discussing intranet ROI. Intranets, obviously, cost more than blogs, but Toby has asked if companies demand ROI justification for their telephone networks? Not even the bean counters insist on a tally of the ROI for phones because everyone knows the consequences of removing them.

But I would make the argument that the kind of ROI assurance executives want is not the kind of ROI accountants measure; we’re getting too hung up on definitions. The ROI in question here is more commonly referred to as a cost (or risk) benefit analysis. While ROI generally refers to the amount of money earned after all expenses are tallied, the risk-benefit analysis weighs the consequences of an action or expense against the benefits it will achieve. Because so many executives fear the consequences and don’t understand or recognize the benefits, I still think this kind of measurement is important.

What’s not important is a dollars-and-cents accounting. At the New Communications Forum, Charlene Li raised the story of the UK blogger who lamented the inability to find his favorite deodorant and the way Unilever was able to capitalize on the post to boost its reputation. That’s an example of the benefit of monitoring the blogosphere that outweighs the risk (the time required to conduct the monitoring and its subsequent drain on productivity).

The employee-written blog from Intuit’s Quickbooks Online that resolves customer concerns equally justifies the amount of time employees spend generating content for the blog and offsets the concerns that an employee might say something wrong. After all, what’s the value of turning a disgruntled customer into a satisfied one who sill sing a company’s praises to friends, family, and (possibly) the audience of his blog readers?

Not all measurement is ROI. Anecdotal evidence counts as measurement as much as numbers do; it’s why measurement experts include both quantitative and qualitative measurement tools in their toolkits.

But until management sees blogging as indispensable as the phones—or their pants—I’ll continue to recommend that the benefits and outcomes are measured, even if only anecdotally. Katie concedes that there are some things that don’t need to be measured. I agree: Pants and telephones are two great examples. But executives aren’t arguing that pants are unnecessary or that telephones pose unnecessary risks. For skeptical executives, measurement remains the most convincing and compelling tool for changing minds.

9. Sites of the month

30 Boxes

There’s an awful lot of buzz surrounding 30 Boxes, a new Web 2.0/AJAX application that several are gushingly proclaiming will do for online calendars what Google Mail did for web-based email. I’ve got an account and I have to admit, it’s drop-dead easy to use and startingly fast. The idea that you can share the calendar with others is not new, but ease of use is what propelled Gmail above its competitors. It’s also free.

http://www.30boxes.com

Thumbstacks

I’ve been playing with a similar piece of software that emulates PowerPoint. Thumbstacks provides the tools for slide show creation on your browser and stores your presentation online, so you can start and run it from anywhere you can connect. You can make your presentations private or share them, as I have with this one that I created just to see how it worked. (It’s not comprehensive, just a test of the app.) This is alpha software so it’s missing a lot of functionality, such as transitions, builds, and the like. There are only three themes (although you can edit a background yourself). Still, this is pretty slick and easy to use. On the plus side, you don’t have to carry presentations with you. On the downside, I’ve presented in plenty of places without Internet connectivity, so you’d have to choose to use this carefully.

http://www.thumbstacks.com

10. HC+T update

I’m speaking at two IABC chapters next week: Brazos Valley (College Station, Texas) and Colorado (Denver).
Next Friday, I’m speaking at a joint meeting of PRSA and IAOC (International Association of Online Communicators) in Valley Forge, PA. Neville Hobson, my co-host on the “For Immediate Release” podcast, will join me virtually from Amsterdam.
I’ll conduct two half-day training sessions for Intel in Portland next month.

11. Boilerplate and subscription information
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Posted by Shel on 03/15 at 05:04 PM
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Tuesday, January 31, 2006

HC+T Update: January 2006

The January 2006 email newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology, in blog/RSS format.

HC+T Update
January 2006

1) In defense of traditional websites
2) Work on an intranet? Beef up your video
3) Why isn’t there more talk of PR uses for SMS?
4) “I’m sorry” getting easier to say
5) Useful labels
6) The heretic and the number cruncher
7) Another way to focus your attention
8) A rationale for moving meetings online
9) Site of the month
10) HC+T update
11) Boilerplate and subscription information

As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog over the past month. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.

1. In defense of traditional websites

A lot of voices are rising up to proclaim the death of the traditional website. For example, in a list of “10 Web Trends That Should Die in 2006,” the Google Blogoscoped blog suggested…

“I hope in 2006, major companies who are still on the web 1.0 train will upgrade to the world of blogs, podcasts, RSS, etc., and replace their ‘homepages’ with it.

There are, to be sure, any number of corporate sites that could benefit from adding blogs, podcasts, and RSS to their sites (not to mention wikis and other social media). There may even be some traditional websites that can stand to migrate entirely to one of these platforms. Amy Gahran, for example, offers a very rational explanation of why her “borchureware” website was better envisioned as a blog. My podcasting co-host Neville Hobson has never had a website to market his services; his online presence is entirely contained within his blog, NevOn. I even plan to tap into the power of my blogging application, Expression Engine, to convert my website so it’s easier to maintain and more tightly integrated with my blog. (Not that my website, powered by PHPWebSite, is all that difficult to maintain.)

Still, the notion that all websites would be better off as blogs is yet another case of overzealous enthusiasts getting carried away. There is plenty of valuie to the traditional hieracrhical website. What kind of site you offer your audiences depends on the purpose you have in mind for it. In other words, strategy should precede tactic. “We need a website; let’s do it as a blog!” is no basis for sound decision-making. Establishing connections through a blog is one terrific goal. Providing quick access to information customers want or need through well-planned information architecture is another. Great as blogs are, they’re not a marvel of information management. After all, they are charaterized by a reverse-chronological-order structure.

Take technical support, for example. I would much rather click through two or three links on a navigationally sound site to find an answer than stumble through searches and categories on a blog. Of course, a technical support blog would certainly enhance and improve any tech support site, but would be a miserable replacement. The blog would keep users up to date on new issues and problems; the hierarchical site would allow users to drill quickly to archived information they need to solve their problems. I’m a huge fan, for example, of Macromedia’s tech support site, which breaks its offerings into clear categories that include the ability to participate in user forums and subscribe to RSS feeds.

Product-oriented sites, like Hewlett-Packard’s, would also be far less usable as a blog. This is one of many sites that has figured out user-driven navigation, with primary links based on what the user is looking for, not how the company or its product line is organized. And imagine turning briliantly conceived media relations sites like General Electric’s and investor relations sites like FedEx’s into blogs and wikis. By all means, add social media elements such as blogs and RSS to these sites, but replace them? How about, instead, using the tool that best achieves your goals?

Philipp Lenssen, author of the Google Blogoscoped blog, is one of those guys who sells hammers, hence seeing every problem as a nail. (I know, I know, I keep using this hackneyed old metaphor, but it works, so what the hell.)

Lenssen offers a couple other points in his 10 trends post with which I disagreed. For example, he wants long articles to appear on a single page, suggesting that “continued” buttons aren’t intuitive and splitting the article in multiple pages harms Google indexing. While I agree that “turn page” is no way to produce copy, we also know that readers won’t scroll endlessly. Context-independence, such as that practiced at WebMonkey, still makes sense. For instance, in an article about podcasting, separate pages are dedicated to discrete topics, such as creating and finding content, recording and mixing, and publishing and syndicating. As for ensuring the article is indexed appropriately in search engines, you could always do what Webmonkey does: provide a printable version in which all the pages are stitched together.

Lenssen would also have organizations dismiss users of low bandwidth, even though they represent nearly half the consumers in the country. You should know your audience, and if they’re dialing in, you dismiss them at your peril.

Bottom line: Let strategy, not tactics, drive your online decisions.

2. Work on an intranet? Beef up your video

I had already been pondering the surge in popularity of online video when Steve Rubel wrote about the “Big Bang” that occurred when Apple began selling TV series episodes and other video content through its iTunes store.

Steve (http://www.micropersuasion.com) asked if your marketing or PR program is Big-Bang-ready. I’m wondering more about intranets.

I have maintained for years that anything that succeeds on the web ultimately finds its way onto intranets. Companies rejected the idea of instant messaging on intranets, for example, dismissing the technology as a way for idle teens to waste time in mindless chatter. Today, more than half the companies in the US employ instant messaging for work-related purposes on their intranets.

The uptake in online video has been staggering. A number of factors have driven it, including…

Adoption of high-speed access passing the tipping point
Easy-to-use editing software leading to thousands of consumer-created videos available online
Services like Atom Films, Our Media, You Tube, Veoh, Google Video, and the iTunes music store providing access to videos

All of these changes don’t hold a candle to the changes about to surge through the population in terms of viewing habits. Even one of TiVo’s executives was quoted saying that TiVo is an interim step. Eventually, through whatever mechanisms emerge, consumers will download the shows they want to watch without waiting for the show’s time slow to roll around. Time-shifting will be the norm (with obvious exceptions for news and sports).

As consumers (who, by the way, also happen to be employees) come to consume online video as a matter of routine, intranets will seem quaint and old-fashioned unless the ability to download video content works somewhat the same. Town hall meetings, executive speeches, video summaries of major company events, chronicles of investor road shows, loops of new television commercials…it’s all content that employees will use if it’s available. Grabbing the latest manager meeting from the intranet should be no different than grabbing the latest episode of “Lost” from the Net.

This is different than the low-quality streams available now on some intranets. We’re talking about subscribable, downloadable content that can be transported from the computer hard drive to a video iPod, a Sony PSP, or any of the other dozen or so handheld devices out there that play video.

Sadly, it’ll take a long time for companies to embrace the idea no matter how much sense it makes. I can hear the dismissals now: “We don’t have bandwidth for that.” “We’re not in the business of providing entertainment for our employees.” “They can just read about it.”

If you work with an intranet, start exploring the potential for quality video sooner rather than later. Many of your employees probably already have devices that will play the videos, and the adoption rate is going to soar. (Apple sold 14 million iPods in the last three months of 2005 alone.) .

3. Why isn’t there more talk of PR uses for SMS?

I’ve been pondering the lack of discussion about the potential PR applications for SMS (short message service for wireless/cell phones). This thinking has been prompted by several news items I’ve read, such as word from a German company called Smartmachine that it has developed a system that lets cell phone users buy and receive tickets to events using SMS. According to an InfoWorld report…

“Smartmachine and its technology partner Skidata have developed a mobile ticketing system that allows customers to have a ticket sent to their mobile phone via SMS (Short Message Service) in the form of a 2D (two-dimensional) bar code. At the gate, they slide their mobile phone display showing the bar code by a bar code reader.”

I’m already printing tickets from Ticketmaster on my computer; the printout includes a bar code that is read as I walk into a theater or concert hall. It’s genius to shift this concept to a cell phone, and even greater genius to use SMS to deliver the goods.This week’s BusinessWeek reports that the government of South Korea is delivering updates on legal proceedings and notices of traffic and environmental violations at a potential saves of $1.2 million in postage (subscription required). The brief item in BusinessWeek also notes that…

“Banks confirm financial transactions via test, doctors and dentists use it to confirm appointments, and in 2004 credit card issuer KEB Credit Service even delivered layoff notices to 161 employees.”

I’m not recommending that companies use SMS—or any tool other than face-to-face—to deliver layoff notices. But these expanding uses of SMS are intriguing, both as an example of what SMS can do and to heighten my wonder that the communication profession hasn’t embraced it. (Marketing has progressed a bit further with SMS—but not much.)

I remember hearing about a session at a conference during which the speaker supported the integration of digital media players into cell phones. The audience scoffed, so the speaker asked how many of those in the room had MP3 players. Most raised their hands. “How many of you have your MP3 players with you?” Only a couple responded. Then the speaker asked, “How many of you have cell phones?” Everybody raised their hands. “And how many of you have your cell phone with you?” Again, everybody raised their hands.

Cell phones are ubiquitous. When you leave the house without yours, don’t you feel like you’ve forgotten to put on pants? And most cell phones has SMS capabilities. We’re missing an opportunity here. My preliminary, off-the-top-of-my-head thinking produced a couple of no-brainer applications:

Let reporters subscribe to SMS messages alerting them to news updates on specific issues and subjects they cover
Residents who live near a manufacturing facility could subscribe to get updates about anticipated traffic jams and other facility-specific news
A crisis team could set up an SMS subscription service to provide news as it happens to interested individuals

One of the readers of my blog offered this idea: “In San Antonio, our local water system (SAWS) sends out weekly watering advice by e-mail, phone message or their call-in line. SMS would be an easy and natural extension and might even save time and money over automated phone messages. Make government cool.”

Other uses should present themselves when we’re engaged in projects — as long as we keep SMS in mind as a potential tool in the toolkit. What other thoughts do you have about how we might incorporate into SMS into communication planning — or what implementations have been been involved with?

4. “I’m sorry” getting easier to say

I’ve seen two instances recently in which companies apologized after incurring the wrath of bloggers.

The most recent is the head of Jung von Matt, a German advertising agency. Jean-Remy von Matt sent an email to his staff complaining about bloggers after several savaged a campaign for which his agency was responsible. He called blogs “the toilet walls of the Internet” and asked, “What on earth gives every computer owner the right to exude his opinion, unasked for? And most bloggers really just exude.”
The blogosphere didn’t react kindly when the internal email was leaked. Now, according to the UK’s Guardian, he’s seeking forgiveness:

“My mother taught me something. If you make a mistake, apologise ... I was agitated, and I wrote an email to my colleagues, who had worked hard for months on the campaign and deserved some encouragement against the criticism, justified or unjustified.”

Von Matt wasn’t content to let it go with the apology, sadly, taking one last shot at bloggers:

“Even if most of the criticism of my email was serious and constructive, I still see it as a breach of respect that an internal memo of mine could be sent scampering like a sow through Little Bloggerville.”

A better job was done by Alan Jones of Bluepulse, a developer of software for mobile phones. The controversy here began when the mobile phone blog Mobhappy found a misstatement on the Bluepulse website. The site claimed the software worked on any phone. The company denied it had ever made the claim and quickly changed the text on its website to suggest it works with almost every phone. The folks at Mobhappy had no trouble pulling a copy of the website from the Google cache link that contained the old claim.

Jones wrote a detailed apology and explanation, as did Luke, the fellow who changed the website. Jones’ mea culpa begins, “I apologise unreservedly; personally and on behalf of bluepulse.”
Reactions from readers who initially blasted Bluepulse were accepting:

“That was a sincere apology and Carlo should update his post to point readers to it.”
“I applaud bluepulse’s decision to own up to and apologize for their mistake. While they certainly should have done so earlier, it speaks positively for the integrity of the company that they will admit to what they do wrong, and seem to have learned their lesson.”
“Mr. Jones’s well thought out and well written apology seems to have saved the day and managed to turn the gathering tide of criticism against them.”
“I just wanted to send you some kudos. After making many mistakes myself and seeing many others do them, I don’t ask anyone that they do not make them. What I do value highly is that they listen to criticism, and do their best to correct the consequences as soon as they’re aware. To me, you’re apologies & explanations above are the best possible handling of that. And we _all_ make mistakes…”
“I think BluePulse has handled this well.”

Jones continued a dialogue in the comment thread, and Carlo Longino (the author of the initial post) did amend it to note that Bluepulse had apologized.

Once, companies that made mistakes could get away with an arrogant attitude because word of their stance was slow to spread and couldn’t spread very far. These days, a sincere apology is the quickest way to quiet the storm when the consumer audience (and that’s who populates the blogosphere) catches you doing whatever it is you shouldn’t have done. Some companies seem to be grasping the concept. Maybe others will learn from the positive results of their actions.

5. Useful labels

I scoffed when a representative from Lake Superior State University, appearing on MSNBC’s “Countdown” (my favorite cable news show) issued the university’s 2006 “List of Words and Phrases Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness.” Among this year’s choices: “breaking news” and “talking points.”

The university has been presenting the list since 1976, making its selections from nominations submitted by just about anybody. I gave up on the list last year when it included the word “blog” along with this rationale for wanting to ban the word:

“Many who nominated it were unsure of the meaning. Sounds like something your mother would slap you for saying.”
“Sounds like a Viking’s drink that’s better than grog, or a technique to kill a frog.”
“Maybe it’s something that would be stuck in my toilet.”
“I think the words ‘journal’ and ‘diary’ need to come back.”

The first two comments suggest a word should be banned if some people don’t know what it means and don’t like how it sounds. By that standard, we’d eliminate 30% of the words in the dictionary. It’s the last comment, though, that warrants some discussion. It seems to have become a popular notion that more general terms should be used to replace specific labels with narrower meanings. In this case, a “journal” or “diary” could be on paper as easily as they could be online. Paper diaries record intimate thoughts, often that people wouldn’t want shared. Blogs use blogging software and incorporate the technology enabled by the software, such as commenting, trackbacks, and the like. Say “journal” and people will wonder what kind. Say “blog” and people will know just what you’re talking about.

The same reasoning bubbled up in my mind when I read a post yesterday from Chuck Tanowitz’s Media Metamorphosis blog in which Tanowitz expressed his disdain for the term “blogger relations:”

“During a recent lunch conversation with John Cass, he and I argued over the term ‘blogger relations.’ Personally, I think it’s a lousy term. He believes it’s the hot term of 2006.

“I’d like to suggest another: Open Communications. I’m thinking about this in the same vein as Open Source, that is, a way for everyone to contribute to the conversation. It’s a way of simply better expressing what is going on today, and giving a label for corporations to attach to this to differentiate it from traditional PR, media relations and advertising.

“At a certain point all of this becomes one and all falls under the general “communications” umbrella, but we’re not there yet.

“For now, it’s all about being Open.”

From where I sit, “blogger relations” has specific meaning. It’s the alternative to “media relations,” coined because public relations practitioners cannot approach bloggers the same way they can pitch media. Blogger relations should, of course, be open. But there’s more to it than that. It is a useful term, for now, as the principles of employing blogs in a public relations context are defined and codified.

The author of the Clogger blog (I have no idea who he or she is; there’s no profile on the page) suggests that any corporate blog is an example of blogger relations:

“Clogs don’t exist. Blogs don’t exist. The corporations are pumping money into blogger relations strategies that are only serving to inform a closed network of other corporations what they’re up to. The information survives forever in a closed loop.”

Again, this post suggests broader meaning than intended. It’s like suggesting that “media relations” is everything an organization says publicly, since the media might pick up on it. While that may be true, “media relations” refers to a defined set of strategies for maintaining positive relationships with the press.

Even terms that are worthy of disparagement can be traced back to a meaning that was useful. In the corporate world, the word “paradigm” is one that evokes laughter and eye rolling. Originally, though, it had a specific meaning that was useful. It was only after every insignificant change in strategy was dubbed a “paradigm shift” by jargon-happy executives that the word fell into disrepute. Still, if a business undergoes a genuine paradigm shift, consistent with the original definition, I have no problem with using the term to define the action. I’d be equally happy to see a company genuinely empower its employees and achieve world-class status.

In the end, though, all this discussion about whether we should use “blogger relations” or “open communication” sparks two conclusions:

Complain all you want. The words are part of the vernacular and aren’t going anywhere.
Focusing on the labels instead of issues of substance undermines credibility. This was Joan Didion’s argument in an essay from her “White Album” collection in which she chided the feminist movement for wasting its capital of specious issues like getting people to say “camerawoman” when it could be striving toward equal pay for equal work.

I do hate “clog” as a term for corporate blogs, though. I always thought those were wooden shoes.

6. The heretic and the number cruncher

John Wagner wasn’t too impressed when Katie Paine introduced a new metric she dubbed PR Value Ratio. Wagner, owner and principal of Houston-based Wagner Communications, has posted several subsequent items that elaborate on his position that communication measurement is overrated and will never be a priority. While Wagner finds some measurement valuable, he sums up his dismissal of measurement as a standard PR component on several grounds:

The tools are no good
The tools don’t measure the right things
Clients don’t want to pay for it
It’s too much work

* Some PR efforts don’t lend themselves to measurement

Wagner summed up his initial salvo with this gem: “When measurement is possible, great. But it will likely always play second fiddle to good old-fashioned intuition.”

Katie responded by suggesting Wagner isn’t the heretic he dubbed himself, but rather a menace and a dinosaur. While Katie echoes the sentiment of a lot of PR pros—measurement is a path to a seat at the management table—Wagner responded:

“If public relations professionals are to be credible “at the table,” we have to make sure that the data we provide for our programs can withstand the scrutiny of bottom-line oriented business managers. In my opinion, that’s impossible to do with most measurement tools based on circulation or viewership.”

The debate has turned into a he-said she-said exercise (paraphrased below):

He said: The number of eyeballs viewing placed content isn’t adequate because it doesn’t assess whether the communication influenced the target audience.

She said: Well, duh. Have you never heard of opinion research?

He said: Sure, I’ve heard of opinion research. But who’s gonna pay for that?

And so it goes. Ultimately, though, I have to wonder how much investigation Wagner has done into communication research tools. I reported here last month about a tool Procter & Gamble developed to measure the value of its PR efforts, a tool that showed PR generated higher return on investment than other marketing channels in four out of six brands the company’s PR department tested. The instrument, called PREvaluate, “incorporates detailed analysis, including information on cost, scope, audience, geographic markets, and possible synergy with other marketing tactics,” according to Hans Bender, the company’s manager of external relations. A review of Angela Sinickas’ manual on internal communication measurement and Lou Williams’ book on external communication measurement reveals a treasure trove of solid tools. So are the basic PR textbooks, which leads me to my next point:

My biggest objection targets Wagner’s assertion that only some PR efforts lend themselves to measurement. Any PR effort, no matter how large or small, should be based on achieving some kind of outcome. John, are you suggesting that outcomes cannot be measured? Here’s what Cutlip, Center, and Broom write in the widely-used PR 101 textbook, “Effective Public Relations”:

“Surely knowledge, outcomes, predisposition changes, and behaviors can be measured. So what excuse justifies not knowing if the action and communication strategies are making progress toward achieving program objectives? What justifies not documenting how the program worked? What justifies not being able to say whether or not the problem has been solved?”

The book lists 13 (count ‘em, 13) types of measurement to conduct along three stages of a project:

Preparation—Adequacy of background information base for designing the program; appropriateness of message and activity content; quality of message and activity presentations
Implementation—Number of messages delivered to appropriate channels and activities designed; number of messages placed and activities implemented; number who received messages and activities; number who attend to messages and activities
Impact—Number who learn message content; number who change opinions; number who change attitudes; number who behave as desired; number who repeat behavior; social and cultural change

All of which can be measured; the tools exist. Gut instinct, which Wagner suggests as an appropriate measure, simply won’t cut it in the boardroom. Every other aspect of business—including PR’s cousins in advertising and marketing—is expected to produce measurable results. With attitudes like Wagner’s, it’s no wonder PR gets so little respect! I would point John to a comment posted to this blog in response to an earier item dealing with measurement:

“I work at a large R&D driven company and it wasn’t until we started measuring our comms performance (especially internally) that leadership started to take us seriously. Any number of humanistic theories meant little to the leadership, but show them a multivariate analysis and we’re talking! Since then our comms organization has nearly doubled in size, management are aware that they need to do much better in their personal presentations, we are more often on-message, we have better focus on our channel management and finally we can follow long-term trends in the organization.”

That’s the power of measurement. As for the notion that clients won’t pay for it, that’s why it needs to be integrated into all programs rather than itemized as an optional service. Perhaps the cost of measurement should be built into hourly billable rates, an assumption that a set percentage of a practitioner’s time will be devoted to assessing the effectiveness of his or her work.

But measure we must. Whether it’s content analysis, opinion surveys, cost avoidance (one of my favorites), eyeballs (if that’s what matters to the client), we need to be able to show that our efforts provide value and we need to be able to show it in a way that’s meaningful to management. Claiming it’s too hard, too expensive, and too much of a challenge to convince clients to undertake measurement are just excuses. Remember what the Holmes Report said about why measurement isn’t happening among the top 100 PR agencies:

“In general, (agency) responses suggested that an failure of commitment—rather than the absence of necessary tools and techniques—is behind the industry’s poor (measurement) performance.”

Until the industry—including Wagner Communications—makes that commitment, we’ll continue to be viewed as lower-tier, lower-funded alternatives to marketing and advertising.

7. Another way to focus your attention

I don’t know how I missed this, but thanks to Dave Winer‘s latest Morning Coffee Notes podcast, I’ve learned about and become an instant fan of Top 10 Sources (http://www.top10sources.com).

Winer interviewed John Palfrey yesterday for MCN. Palfrey is founder and publisher of the site; he’s better known as director of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The idea behind Top 10 Sources is simple. A staff picks a topic, then culls through blogs and podcasts to identify the top 10 sources in that subject. The Yahoo!-like index of topics makes it easy to find the subject you’re interested in. Under “Health and Science,” for example, you’ll find Women in Science, Environment, Yoga, Women’s Health, Astronomy, Science News, Weight Loss and Controversial Science. A new topic is added daily.

Click to the topic page and you’ll find an introduction from the editor who pulled together the sources followed by the latest posts from each of the 10 identified blogs/podcasts. I checked the Guitars listing under Music, and found a truly useful set of blogs. The posts are listed in “river of news” style, with each page serving as a feed aggregator. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for each page, pulling the updated contents of each topic into your own news reader; alternatively, you can get the OMPL file to update your OPML reader on a daily basis.

The home page is handled a lot like Wikipedia, with different featured topics appearing every day.

In a press release, Palfrey said:

“Top 10 Sources is about adding a human element to searching and sorting through the increasingly great syndicated content on the Web. Much like Yahoo! brought a hierarchy to the early days of the commercial Internet with its browser, Top 10 Sources organizes information in blogs, podcasts, wikis, photoblogs and other sources into ‘reading lists.’ The goal is to foster an active conversation among readers, authors and editors that is about, and results in, great online content with context.”

The site launched in early December, so it’s not surprising that the Business category is anemic (Venture Capital and Your Money are the only two topics listed so far), but I expect that’ll change as new subjects continue to be added. In the MCN interview, Palfrey also promised that editors would keep an eye on the topics, deleting sources that lose their relevance and adding new ones that rise in prominence. It’s a site—and an idea—to keep an eye on.

8. A rationale for moving meetings online

How many meetings do you attend that could be offloaded to a wiki or some other online mechanism? The kneejerk reaction to such a suggestion is that online community is reducing the amount of face-to-face contact we have and that’s a bad idea. We’ve been hearing this since message boards first gained popularity.

I’ve never bought this argument. I’ve met more people online whom I have since gotten to know in the real world, people with whom I never would have dined or worked had I not gotten to know them first in the virtual world. Using the asynchronous online world as a surrogate for meetings also lets people participate without having to travel or block out inconvenient time slots.

Now there’s a new argument for shifting face-to-face meetings to a team wiki, a team blog, or some other online channel. According to research from the University of Minnesota (Duluth), meetings have a deleterious effect on employees. The study found “a general relationship between meeting load and the employee’s level of fatigue and subjective workload.”

The study, reported in the journal, journal “Group Dynamics: Theory, Research and Practice,” was based on a test of two theories:

Employees experience increased “negative effects” when the number of meetings they have to attend increases
Employee experience increased “negative effects” when they have to spend more time in meetings.

“Negative effects” refers to fatigue and worsening moods. The authors of the study — Alexandra Luong and Steven G Rogelberg — arrived at the notion of “the meeting as one more type of hassle or interruption that can occur for individuals.”

The Guardian has a complete article on the study, including some of the early research that informed the project. (For example, a 1973 study established that typical managers spend more of their time in meetings than doing anything else.)

Of course, some meetings will need to be held just because they’re the most practical way to accomplish the goal that led to the meeting. But this research could serve as an argument to reduce the total number of meetings and shift the work to a project wiki or other online productivity tool.

9. Sites of the month

The Bad Pitch blog has gotten a lot of attention, and for good reason. The communication profession takes a helluva beating for the bad pitches—often in the form of miserable press releases—that hit the desks of reporters and get posted to the web. Kevin Dugan and Richard Laermer have launched a blog dedicated to displaying the worst of the worst. Bad pitches—ones Dugan and Laermer find themselves and others that are sent to them—are posted without the name of the offending practitioner, unless they get three from the same person; then the practitioner is “outed.” The blog also features good pitches (for balance). But it’s reading the losers that makes the blog a guilty pleasure—and a learning experience. These are, as the blog’s name implies, real doozies.

http://badpitch.blogspot.com

Thanks to Constantin Basturea, we have links to a whole new batch of PR blogs. Constantin notes that this list brings the total number on his PR Blogs List to 330. It made me happy to see I was already reading several of these, and had subscribed to the feeds from four of them. The real delight was discovering a blog by an old friend I hadn’t seen or heard from in years. Jeri Cartwright was part of Craig Jolley’s original “Communicating in the Wired World” tour, sponsored by Lexis-Nexis (Craig’s employer at the time), back around 1992 and 1993. Usually, the speakers for this daylong session designed to introduce communicators to the Internet and other online services (like CompuServe and Lexis-Nexis) included Pete Shinbach and me. I remember like it was yesterday, though, the tour on which Jeri joined us. She’s bright and funny and way ahead of her time, and it was delightful to find her blogging. I’ve already dropped her an email. Who knows who else I’ll run into as more practitioners take up their keyboards to blog?

http://www.bloglines.com/public/prblogs

Teleflip has appraently been around for a while, but I hadn’t heard of it. Now that I have, I’ll probably use the hell out of it. Innovated by a fellow who was tired of not being able to send text messages to cell phones from his computer, Teleflip lets you use your email to do just that, and it’s completely free. I just tested it, sending a message to my own cell, and the message arrived in under a minute. Just send the message to the phone number at teleflip.com (I’d type in an example but some scum-sucking spammer would probably harvest it and start flooding the Teleflip service with garbage.) The service is currently workin in North America, and any costs your cell phone company would charge for a text message would apply. More information is at the Teleflip website. Let’s hear it for the altruists of the world.

http://www.teleflip.com

10. HC+T update

>>I’m presenting a weeklong series of presentation and consultations for the tourism board of a major US city in early February

>>Also in February, I’ll conduct daylong workshops in two cities for a Canadian conglomerate

>>I’m speaking at the Des Moines PRSA chapter on February 16

11. Boilerplate and subscription information

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HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
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Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

Posted by Shel on 01/31 at 07:17 AM
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Monday, December 19, 2005

HC+T Update: December 2005

The December 2005 email newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology, in blog/RSS format.

HC+T Update

December 2005

Webinars Are Back! First Up: Social Communication
The Evolution of Intranets
Honeywell Employees Are Blogging
Putting Some Structure To Blogging
“I’m Going To Sue The Internet”
Another City, Another Slam At PR
Podcasts As Conversations
Typography On The Web
Site of the Month
HC+T Update
Boilerplate And Subscription Information

1. Webinars Are Back! First Up: Social Communication

Bring the Power of Social Software to your Intranet
with Shel Holtz, ABC
Five consecutive Mondays
Beginning January 9, 2006

By now, you’ve no doubt been inundated with material about social software like blogs, wikis, podcasts, social tagging, citizen journalism…the list goes on! What you may not know is that you can tap into the power of these tools to enhance your internal communication. You can even designate part of your intranet as a place for employees to share knowledge and publish news that just isn’t important enough to warrant the attention of the employee communications staff. In fact, there are companies already doing this—and they’re not all the usual high-tech suspects you might expect.

Shel Holtz, ABC, one of the world’s leading authorities on online communication, understands these technologies and how they can add exciting new dimensions to your communications at practically zero cost. And he has the examples to prove it works!

In this Webinar, you’ll learn:

How to use a blog to supplement or even replace your current news delivery process.
How employee blogs can make the whole organization smarter, faster, and more competitive.
The role of citizen journalism on the intranet, which lets employees publish their own news.
The value of a company-specific version of “wikipedia” inside your organization.
Why a podcast can be a better way to deliver news and information than text.
How to convince management to let you adopt these new technologies.

During the Webinar, you’ll benefit from lectures, links to other online resources, downloadable handouts, and interaction with your instructor as well as other Webinar participants. All this costs only $175—a fraction of what you’d spend on a similar session in a hotel meeting room—and you’ll never have to leave your desk.

Webinars are asynchronous—you participate when it’s convenient for you. A new lecture is posted each Monday morning, but you can take advantage of it whenever you have the time. You can view a video introduction to Webinars and tour a demo Webinar at http://webinar.holtz.com. That’s also where you’ll register.

Don’t miss the opportunity to learn to conduct these audits for yourself. Register today!

Registration

2. The Evolution Of Intranets

A lot has been made in the last couple days over Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz’s assertion that “intranets are going to die.” Schwartz, who made the remarks during a talk at Yahoo!’s Syndicate conference in San Francisco, noted that blogs will replace them. His prediction comes shortly after Ross Mayfield told BusinessWeek blogger/podcaster/reporter Stephen Baker that wikis could replace intranets.

Schwartz is a hardcore blogger, and a damn good one. Mayfield’s company, SocialText, sells wikis. It makes sense, then, for each to favor his technology of choice as the replacement for intranets. The problem, though, is that wikis and blogs both operate on a web platform. Go ahead. Go to any blog or wiki you choose and, using your browser tools, view the source code. By God, it’s HTML, isn’t it? And what is an intranet? It’s a private web for your organization. Imagine that -— your intranet can have all the blogs and wikis your company can stand. But that doesn’t stop it from being an intranet, assuming your definition is “the web inside your company.”

Of course, the wiki/blog argument isn’t the first one to mistakenly spell the end of intranets. I can’t begin to count the number of people who have told me, “We don’t have an intranet any more. We’ve gone to a portal.” Sheesh. A portal is a front-end view of your intranet! It adds a lot of functionality (like personalization, customization, and the ability pipe a lot of content through portlets), but it’s still ultimately parsing HTML. In other words, portals, wikis, and blogs are all elements of intranets that evolve. They are not replacements.

As I noted here earlier, wikis and blogs cannot replace some of the functionality of an intranet. I have no doubt that Schwartz, if asked, would agree that the online budgeting process cannot be shoehorned into a blog and that a wiki is not the best foundation for a comprehensive, database-driven, searchable, knowledge-based employee directory. The number of applications that reside on intranets that employees use to manage their day-to-day activities is huge; they go well beyond knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Not that knowledge sharing and collaboration aren’t important; they’re vital, and more companies need to adopt tools like blogs and wikis that make it easy for employees to engage in both. But a robust intranet does more. For example…

The notion of wiki-as-intranet is based on ease of publishing. It’s the same motivation that leads the folks at some blog software companies to claim an intranet could be reconfigured 100% on blogging software. Both suggestions come from the “selling hammers” school of business solutions: If you’re selling hammers, every problem looks like a nail. But intranets are more complex beasts that cannot be supported by either platform alone. At least, not if they’re good intranets. For example…

Applications —- I’ve maintained for years that few employees will visit an intranet just to read the company news. They’ll read the company news when they visit the intranet to do something work-related. On the best intranets, that includes streamlined work processes that have been webified. At a basic level, this includes interactive forms, calculators, data lookups, and the like. As noted earlier, benefits enrollment is a standard element of many intranets, and we’re not talking about just the form, but the ability to match healthcare providers to zip codes and a host of other functions. Expense reimbursement, performance evaluations, procurement, the job interview process, and a host of other work processes that have been moved online require some sophisticated programming.
Portals —- The move to a portal environment is based on the idea of “portlets,” little self-contained windows into which data of just about any type can be piped, whether it’s static HTML content or current sales figures streamed in live from a database. While many portal initiatives have failed, many companies have terrific portals that allow employees to tailor the content they see to their work needs. Given the average of a year and $1 million to implement a portal, I can’t see many companies sacrificing the benefits to move to a blog or wiki environment.
Static content—Some static web content requires some serious thinking around its navigation. Consider employee benefits information. Wikifying or blogging this content makes no sense, since there should be some hierarchical navigation that includes multiple paths to the same content. For example, you should be able to view medical benefits as a category and navigate quickly to the benefit you’re interested in; you should also be able to view a “Life Events” listing and see links to all relevant benefits, which may include some medical benefits. It should be the same block of copy; nobody should have to alter content twice when a single benefit changes.
Interactive content —- I recently saw an intranet that contained a drop-dead fabulous marketplace section. Here, employees could interact with data using a variety of technologies (including a rare brilliant use of Flash) to learn about competitors, customers, the regulatory environment, and a variety of other aspects of the market in which the cmpany operates.

Of course, if you define the intranet as a bunch of static web pages, or a cumbersome, centrally-managed content management system, or a bunch of portlets without substance, then it’s easy to justify the claim that intranets will die. I simply reject these definitions. It’s like saying the World Wide Web will die and be replaced with blogs and wikis. Nonsense. The web is evolving to include blogs and wikis. Ditto intranets.

3. Honeywell Employees Are Blogging

Sometimes it’s difficult to convince management to embrace the idea of employee blogs when nearly all the examples you can offer come from high-tech companies. The kneejerk reaction of many executives (and not just to employee blogging initiatives) is, “We’re not a high-tech company.”

Thomas Nelson publishers has been the only solid example I’ve been able to offer of a more traditional business with an employee blogging network. Now I can also point to Honeywell, which so far has three bloggers on its network. The Honewell Career Blogs are touted as “a great way to gain a deeper level of understanding to the culture, people, work and environment of Honeywell.” So far, the employees blogging come from HR, marketing, and the company’s integrated supply chain. Focusing blogs on recruiting sounds like a great way to convince management of the value. Honeywell’s employee blogs are at http://honeywellblogs.com.

4. Putting Some Structure To Blogging

Search is an unholy mess. Even with advances from Google and others that represent quantum leaps over the days when HotBot and AltaVista sat atop the heap, search is still a frustrating and inefficient way to find what you’re looking for. Say you’re going to Sausalito and you want to find some reviews of hotels in the seaside town. So you hit Google and type in Sausalito, hotel and reviews. The results are a hodgepodge of pages that include reviews along with some that just include the word somewhere on the page.

That’s why, once I was able to understand it, the notion of XML seemed so exciting. If the travel industry agreed that the tag review would be used for reviews, then any computer parsing the code would recognize it as such, making it easy to separate out reviews from other content.

It’s working within the confines of XML specifications that have been adopted, but it’s not widespread enough to help the average person (that is, me) find just what I’m looking for. And, to complicate matters, there are now between 20 and 40 million blogs out there with with tons of great content that’s just as hard to sift through despite the great work being done by the various blog search engines.

At the Syndicate conference in San Francisco this week, Marc Canter of Broadband Mechanics introduced an initiative to do something about it. Called Structured Blogging, it involves using a standard form for blog entries that will help identify the nature of the entry and make it reusable based on whatever somebody is looking for. What that means, as far as I understand it (which may not be very far), a post of a movie review on your blog would look like any other post to your blog, but somebody retrieving all movie reviews would find them in a standard, common format.

Here’s how it’s explained on the initiative’s website:

“These styles and tags ensure that movie and book reviews don’t look like calendar or journal entries, and that each content type can be quickly recognized and processed by automated search services and other applications. Woven into the HTML of a blog post, this information travels with it through syndication feeds, readers, and aggregators. Ultimately, it can even be converted out to other formats our Structured Blogging tools support such as RDF in XML.”

Here’s one scenario describing the extent of the potential for Structured Blogging, described by Pamela Parker at ClickZ:

“You’re a marketer at a retail operation specializing in the latest fitness gear and apparel. You want to run a campaign promoting a sale you’re having on Saucony Grid Hurricane running shoes. So, you pull up your content management application. You select “offer to sell” from a drop-down box. Up pops a list of fields, which you fill in, one by one. You make selections for item type, brand, price, colors, sizes, etc. You hit “publish.” It appears on your company’s Web site. You wait.

“Meanwhile, a fitness content site is collecting offers to display in its “classifieds” section. Someone has asked to be alerted if Saucony Grid Hurricane shoes, in a women’s size 8.5, are offered below $90. That person gets a notification—perhaps on her instant messenger application—and a sale results.”

So far, the “microcontent types” defined by the initiative include reviews, events, lists, media (audio, video, images), and people and group showcases.

The initiative has some interesting participants, including PubSub (one of my favorite RSS tools), Bloglines, Feedster, SocialText, Rojo and Xanga, to name just a few.

So far, Structured Blogging plugins are available for WordPress and Moveable Type.

It didn’t take long for some people to throw cold water on the notion. Paul Kedrosky says it’ll never gain traction because people are too lazy to take the extra steps needed to apply it. Over at Corante, Stowe Boyd expects dozens of reasons for shrugging it off will emerge in the months ahead. I’ve also heard some criticism that suggests it’s an effort by a few to wrest control of the uncontrollable blogosphere.

I see two reasons why it could succeed, though. First, if the benefits are strong enough—that is, we fall in love with the kind of search results it gives us. This applies both to those doing the searching and to those (like many of us bloggers) who want our stuff to be found. Second, if all of the blogging applications make it dead easy by integrating it into their publishing interfaces, then those of us who want our stuff to be found more easily will have an added incentive. After all, many of us take the extra step to tag or categorize our entries when we don’t have to.

In any case, it’ll be interesting to watch the initiative unfold. There’s an associated blog that’s already listing reactions, as well as a restricted-access wiki where details are emerging.

5. “I’m Going TO Sue The Internet”

About eight or nine years ago, I was brought into a midwest financial institution to, among other things, speak with the executive team about the Internet. My goal was to help them understand the Net’s importance to business. Among other things, I showed them some unfavorable Usenet newsgroup posts about the company. The CEO was aghast. Seeing the CEO’s reaction, the general counsel stood up and said, “Don’t worry, sir. I’m going to sue the Internet.”

If you believe thinking like the top lawyer’s clueless threat has given way to higher levels of enlightenment, you probably haven’t seen the class action suit leveled against Wikipedia. The supporters of the suit have put out a call for individuals and organizations to join the suit if they have been the victim of inaccurate postings on the open-source encyclopedia:

“WikipediaClassAction.org is currently gathering complaints from the entire Internet community, including individuals, corporations, partnerships, etc., who believe that they have been defamed and or who have been or are the subject of anonymous and malicious postings to the popular online encyclopedia WikiPedia.

“Alternatively, if you are aware of postings on Wikipedia that are either untrue and or potentially libellous to another, please contact them and make them aware of the offending content and this website so that they may file a complaint with our group.”

The suit is troubling on a number of levels. If successful, it would have a significant chilling effect on open-source initiatives of any kind. But even more noteworthy is the mentality that underlies the suit: that somebody must be accountable for everything. Dana Blankenhorn has it exactly write in a commentary on ZDNet:

“Wikipedia is about open source information, knowledge that is held in common. The “scandal” involving John Seigenthaler gave him far more satisfaction than he would have gotten if he had been lied about in, say, The New York Times. The lie was taken down. Wikipedia apologized, The take-down got more publicity than the original lie. The liar was found and lost his job.”

I find it particularly interesting that the author of the Seigenthaler piece didn’t realize the Wikipedia was anything more than a satire and entered the false information as a joke aimed at a colleague. How many others who stumble on Wikipedia don’t have a clue what it is? When giving talks, I mention Wikipedia when introducing the subject of wikis; at least half the people in the room have never heard of it. And these are nearly always professional communicators.

Blankenhorn offers some remedies to the Wikipedia situation. People who use it should do what journalists do: Verify information with a second source. And Wikipedia should get a business model providing some resources to hire editors to police the site. (Of course, this means somebody actually would be accountable, subjecting Wikipedia to even more legal action.)

In any case, I hope the class action suit slips into the oblivion it deserves as the courts recognize the nature of open source material.

Speaking of courts, I also hope the $17.5 million lawsuit filed by Agence Press against Google finds its way into history’s dustbin. The idea that a search engine is violating copyright is ludicrous. Without search, the Web becomes an all-but-useless curiosity. I suppose the French press agency would prefer its content not be found. If the company is so worried about copyright violation, it could always remove its content from the press or take any one of a number of very simple actions to keep its content from being indexed by search bots. But the ridiculous suit has not kept the European Publishers Council from declaring war on search engines, with top dog Francisco Pinto Balsemao commenting in Brussels last week that publishers cannot continue to allow search engines to profit from their content:

“It is fascinating to see how these companies ‘help themselves’ to copyright-protected material, build up their own business models around what they have collected, and parasitically, earn advertising revenue off the back of other people’s content. This is unlikely to be sustainable for publishers in the longer term.”

With brain-dead thinking like this, it’s no wonder newspapers are in trouble.

6. Another City, Another Slam At PR

Here we go…the third incident I’ve reported recently in which a local entity has come under fire for the egregious sin of investing in public relations. This time, the culprit is Springfield, Massachusetts, where the Finance Control Board spent $10,000 to contract with one Paul J. Robbins to “chip away at the city’s image as a dangerous place,” according to a report in the Springfield Republican. Outraged by the expense were City Councilor Rosemarie Mazza Moriarty and the police patrolman’s union.

“A better use of the money would have been to pay overtime for a police officer or a civilian dispatcher, Councilor Rosemarie Mazza Moriarty said Friday. “To be able to hire a ‘public relations’ employee to spin the bad news is absolutely ludicrous,” Mazza Moriarty said.”

I doubt the engagement includes a requirement to “spin” anything; instead, reference to the PR perjorative is Moriarty’s own spin. (WWLP, the NBC affiliate in Springfield, had a different take on the arrangement.) But again, the situation symbolizes the PR profession’s image problem when the natural reaction to such a hire is that the city simply wants to spin situations rather than actually address them. Are the professional associations that represent the profession paying attention to these incidents?

7. Podcasts As Conversations

On the Frappr map for our podcast, one of the contributors offered this comment: “Love the show! Thanks for including us in the conversation.”

A conversation in a podcast? Not according to Steve Rubel, who comments about the possibility that a product-focused podcast is co-hosted by two fictitious characters: “I feel this approach is suitable for a podcast but not for a blog because it’s unidirectional.”

I disagree on a number of levels. In a nutshell:

Not all blogs are mutlidirectional.
Not all podcasts are unidirectional.

You can find a variety of definitions for the word online. The one I like is the simplest: “Talk between people,” although “the use of speech for informal exchange of views or ideas or information etc.” isn’t bad. The best conversations take place in real time, face-to-face or, at least, voice-to-voice. Instant messaging and SMS also fit the bill for real-time conversation.

Beyond these approaches, however, every online conversation is asynchronous, which simply means not synchronized. Both dimensions of blog conversations are asynchronous. They do not occur in real time.

The first dimension is contained within the blog. I write my post, log out, then dash off for a client meeting. You decide to check your RSS feeds, read my post and, after deciding you want to comment, visit my blog and contribute your thoughts. I don’t see your comments until I return that evening and, because of time zone differences, you’ve already gone to bed by the time I get around to answering you. The second dimension is blogospheric. You write a post. I read it and write about it myself on my own blog. You check your trackbacks the next day and see that three or four of us have written about your posts. By tomorrow, 20 more people may have written about my original post. It’s easy to monitor conversation in the blogosphere with tools like Technorati and Blogpulse.

In both cases, a real-time (or synchronous) conversation would have wrapped up in anywhere from a few minutes to a couple hours. In the online world, it can drag on for days. For all the discussion about the speed of the blogosphere, it’s relative. Compared to a real-time conversation, it moves at a glacial pace. Of course, the notion of drawing an audience the size of the blogosphere into a real-time conversation is absurd, hence the growth in the popularity of asynchronous channels over the last 20 years or so.

Once we understand that conversations slow down when they’re not in real time, the extent to which this channel or that one facilitate conversation is only a matter of degrees. Blogs may be slower than traditional bulletin boards as a conversation channel for a defined group of people, but they’re faster than podcasts. Podcasts are probably faster than other channels, like static web pages with feedback buttons. And where do wikis fall on the spectrum?

“The Hobson & Holtz Report” most definitely encourages conversation through a variety of channels, including the podcast blog and audio comments our listeners email to us. The pace of the conversation is slow—Monday and Thursday—because that’s how often we address the feedback we get. A-list podcasters like Adam Curry engage in even hotter conversations that transcend both media. Consider Curry’s current controversy over his efforts to alter how he was represented in the Wikipedia entry on podcasting’s history. The conversation about Curry’s actions began on blogs, but he responded on his podcast; his podcast explanation was a clearly defined element of the conversation. His earlier dialogues with listeners on topics such as biodiesel represent other examples of podcast-driven conversation.

Podcasts even spark conversations of the blogospheric nature, with one podcaster playing a clip of another’s show in order to comment on it. I’ve done this with Rubel’s show, for example.

To complicate matters, let’s consider blogs that are unidirectional. Randy Baesler’s Boeing blog comes to mind. Comments are turned off, and while other bloggers could certainly reference it, they don’t. It’s not even ranked on BlogPulse, and Technorati shows only 20 posts on other blogs in the last 241 days that reference “Randy’s Journal.”

One last consideration: Podcasting is 16 months old. Given adequate time, the medium will probably develop even more efficient means of building conversation.

Ultimately, it’s a vast oversimplification to suggest that blogs are multidirectional and podcasts are unidirectional. The notion of podcasts as a one-way medium is based on the the fact that they are recorded audio files to which listeners can only listen. But audiences can do more than just listen, and a blog post is, at the end of the day, nothing more than an archived bit of text that a blogger wrote and that readers read. The difference between them is based only on the sense (sound vs. sight) used to absorb the message, not in the audience’s ability to offer feedback to it.

Our listener who thanked us for including our audience in the conversation is exactly right, then. It’s not either-or; it’s just a matter of degrees.

8. Typography On The Web

A few years back, I included an item in my monthly email newsletter about a study on typefaces for the web. It was a small item, nowhere near the top of the newsletter, and I took no position on the result of the study. The study, if I remember it correctly, came out of a Texas university and concluded that serif fonts were best for body copy on the web mainly because it’s the font most readers are accustomed to seeing in print. Think about reading a page of sans serif in a magazine or book; it’s just wrong. The study involved test subjects reading web pages and concluding the serif fonts were easier to read.

Despite my matter-of-fact approach to reporting the study results, that little item produced more email than anything I’d written about since I started distributing an email newsletter back in around 1995. Typography arouses passion in communicators. At our hearts, most of us are craftspeople who started out writing and designing print publications. I still have a Pantone color swatch book in my desk drawer, and I can’t seem to get rid of my XActo knives, even though I couldn’t tell you how long it’s been since I’ve needed to slice up a galley. I used to spend hours poring over Communication Arts magazine. And like so many others, I devoted a fair amount of time to learning typography. (I go back to the days when we had to count headlines: fjilt were half counts, M and W were one-and-a-half; remember that?)

Scientifically speaking, there is no resolution to the serif vs. sans serif debate for web content, although most designers lean toward sans serif. You can find studies to support your choice, so they don’t help much. Personally, I’ve always leaned toward serif, but only at 12 pt. and above. Beyond the serif vs. sans serif debate, typography has been the oprhaned stepchild of web design, with few choices and little control.

Happily, I found a terrific article on web typography at Sitepoint. Written by London-based Multimap.com web developer Andy Hume, “The Anatomy of Web Fonts” goes into considerable detail about online type, but Hume manages to keep it understandable and engaging. Take his approach to the serif/sans serif issue:

“Serif fonts are very popular in print, and although there is a certain amount of debate regarding which family of typeface is most legible on the screen, I fall firmly in to the camp that believes that sans-serif faces are a more suitable option…The variable boldness and fine extra strokes of the serif fonts, particularly at smaller sizes of body text, often appear pixilated and untidy. This is still the case even with the most modern anti-aliasing techniques. With anti-aliasing enabled, the serif fonts look blurred (which is exactly what they are) around their curves and terminals. On the other hand, the straight, low contrast, open strokes of a sans-serif font, such as Verdana, will always leave a good impression on-screen.”

The article includes plenty of graphics to illustrate Hume’s points. Verdana, for example, was designed specifically for the screen and has plenty of space between letters (kerning) and within characters (glyphs). The article covers technical issues like additive and subtractive color systems (and why they matter), screen resolution, the inability to control final output (compared to print), and a variety of other topics. It also offers advice on choosing and implementing fonts, including applying Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to your work. For all you hard-core communication tacticians out there, it’s a piece worth bookmarking. As for me, I’ve never been married to serif fonts, and I can feel myself coming around to the sans serif camp.

9. Sites of the Month

Podzinger actually searches the voice file, translates it to text (presumably using some kind of voice-to-text application), then indexes the results. Clicking the highlighted word in the search results begins playing the podcast from that point; just clicking the “play” button starts the show at the beginning. The audio playback only works in Microsoft Internet Explorer; Podzinger will need to make it work in Firefox, too, but for a new offering in beta, it’s pretty slick. Podzinger’s a product of BBN, the company that is most responsible for development of the Internet.

ttp://www podzinger.com

When I first became aware of RSS, Corante was one of the first sites I found employing the technology. I was immediately hooked; Corante provided me with literally the first feed to which I ever subscribed. You can’t imagine how honored I am to be among the nearly two dozen marketing/PR bloggers invited to provide content to the Corante Marketing Hub, particularly considering the company I’m keeping. The other contributors include…

Renee Hopkins Callahan (the Hub’s editor)
* Elizabeth Albrycht
Tom Asacker
Toby Bloomberg
Bruce Fryer
Susan Getgood
Neville Hobson (my podcast co-host)
Christopher Carfi
Lois Kelly
Andrew Lark
Mike Manuel
Grant McCracken
Michele Miller
John Moore
Johnnie Moore
Jennifer Rice
Evelyn Rodriguez
Mary Schmidt
John Winsor
David Wolfe

Drop by for a visit!

http://marketing.corante.com

10. HC+T Update

I’m spending a week with the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation to help the communication staff get up to speed on new media.
I’m speaking in January at Ragan’s Engagement conference.
Other speaking engagements coming up include IABC/Des Moines, IABC/Colorado, the New Communications Forum, and the International Association of Online Communicators.

11. Boilerplate And Subscription Information

You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!

HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe, unsubscribe and view back issues here.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader.

Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

Posted by Shel on 12/19 at 05:46 PM
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Sunday, November 27, 2005

HC+T Update: November 2005

The November 2005 email newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology, in blog/RSS format.

HC+T Update
November 2005

Companies Blocking Access To Blogs
More Support For Leader Communication
Power To The Press Release
Smart Corporate Blogging
Ex-Employee Blogging
A Demo Corporate Blog
Editorial Pages Attack PR Expenditures
Who Speaks For The Future Of Print?
Site of the Month
HC+T Update
Boilerplate And Subscription Information

1. Companies Blocking Access To Blogs

If you’re behind a company firewall, there’s an increasing chance that you’re not able to read this—or any other—blog.

A few months back, while working with a client, I entered the URL of a blog that contained information that would be useful to the task at hand. Instead of getting to the blog, the screen displayed one of those corporate security notices that I was trying to access an unauthorized site. My client rolled his eyes and said, “They must be blocking blogs.” I was able to get to my blog, which is not hosted by any of the blogging services, but Blogger, Typepad, and the other hosted services were inaccessible. I was aghast. “Does your IT department know,” I told him, “how many bloggers are writing about your industry?”

Over at Geek News Central, Todd Cochrane reports that his company’s IT department has blocked any site with the word “blog” in it. Cochrane also points to a Wired article about an increasing number of companies shutting down employee access to blogs. These companies cite security fears:

“...companies worry that employees might leak sensitive material—perhaps inadvertently—while posting comments to blog message boards. In a survey of over 300 large businesses conducted in conjunction with Forrester, Proofpoint found 57.2 percent of respondents were concerned with employees exposing sensitive material in blogs. That’s higher than the portion concerned with the risks of P2P networks.”

Others think the security issue is a smokescreen and that companies are more concerned that employees are wasting work time on blogs; the old productivity issue is raising its ugly head again.

Former Sun Microsystems communications executive Andy Lark reports where some of these fears may be coming from -— another one of those absurd surveys that talley up the number of hours employees spend reading blogs and equating that to lost productivity. This one, from Advertising Age, claims workers will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years in 2005 reading blogs. Blog readers, the research suggests, take daily 40-minute blog breaks.

Rather than ascertain if there really is a problem—if work isn’t getting done on time or the quality of work is suffering—reactionary IT managers simply throw up a roadblock. I keep wondering: With all these online obstacles to productivity, why does the Labor Department continue to report increased US worker productivity? The answer is simple, from where I sit: Workers are making up the time they spend on non-work related activities, on top of which the Net is already making them more productive.

Cochrane sees it this way: “For those of you that are dealing with an IT department that is about control versus productivity, we interrupt this discussion to say some are taking 20 years of innovation and have reduced my computer’s ability to perform down to word processing and e-mail. “What these IT departments fail to understand is that blogs offer a rich source of information that can improve productivity. In the workplace, blogs can serve as a knowledge-sharing resource. With over 20 million blogs tracked by Technorati, there are bound to be some that address a question or problem an employee is working on. (Every one of the blogs I track each morning is related to my work.) But rather than communicate policies to prevent problems, some companies are simply shutting off access.

It’s not just businesses, either. In New Jersey, a private high school principal assembled the school’s 900 students in an assembly and told them they had to take down any blogs they may have created or face suspension. The rationale: Keep the kids safe from online predators. Says Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Kevin Bankston, ““It’s an incredible overreaction based on an unproven problem. If they’re concerned about safety, they could train students in what they should or shouldn’t put online. Kids shouldn’t be robbed of the primary communication tool of their generation.”

Again, training versus censorship is the intelligent solution. Expect to see more institutions implement the draconian solution instead.

2. More Support For Leader Communication

The more I talk about the communication role of senior leaders during times of organizational change, the more supporting evidence I get. Take, for instance, the following excerpt from a book called “Organizational Surveys” (1996, Jossey-Bass). William A. Schiemann penned Chapter 4, “Driving Change Through Surveys: Aligning Employees, Customers, and Other Key Stakeholders.” He wrote,

“From my familiarity with many firms who have conducted linkage studies, i have found that one of the best predictors of financial and operating performance is employee rating of management capability, followed closely by employee perceptions of supervisory support and capability. Over the years, I have come to believe that if I could measure only one dimension, it would be employee ratings of management. Those ratings often account for the most variance in customer and financial performance.”

The italics are Schiemann’s, not mine. The excerpt appeared in my fax machine courtesy of Angela Sinickas, one of the leading thinkers in terms of employee communication measurement. Angela appended the paragraph with this note: “And employees can’t rate leaders highly, or even at all, if there’s no communication between them.”

To underscore the point, Angela also sent along the results of some research she conducted for a client. In the study, Angela reported, “The greatest predictor of (the client’s) employees’ overall satisfaction with communication is how they feel about senior leaders’ communication behaviors, accounting for over one-third of the satisfaction.” Supervisors’ communication behavior and employees’ level of information each accounted for just over 20% of the variations in overall satisfaction.

In this study, Angela recommended that senior leaders focus on the communication behaviors with the highest interpretational weights that were rated low by employees responding to the survey. These included…

Senior leaders explain the reasons behind decisions
Senior leaders clearly explain the direction the company is heading
Senior leaders keep employees informed about things we need to know

One other question was included in the study—“Senior leaders provide information that is believable.” In this case, employees were reasonably positive. The point, though, is that these behaviors are important to employees, despite assertions that senior executive communication is irrelevant, boring, and a waste of time as far as most front-line employees are concerned. Clearly, from the Towers Perrin research to Schiemann’s body of research to individual in-house studies, that’s simply not the case. When communicating to employees during change, supervisors are important but nothing is more important than the communication behaviors of senior leadership.

But wait. There’s more. This time it comes in the form of a study conducted by the Hay Group, which surveyed 1.2 million employees at 400 companies (not a bad sample) and determined that leader communication is “a leading factor in employee motivation, morale and even loyalty,” according to CIO magazine’s report on the study. Hay’s research also indicates that “keeping workers informed is not something executives do well.”

Any number of reasons account for poor executive communication. It is the job of the internal communication department to help improve—not ignore—the leader’s communication role. Otherwise, their organizations risk high turnover from employees who don’t understand where their organization is headed. Not their own department’s role in achieving company goals, a critical role for immediate supervisors and managers. It is the executive’s job to communicate the big picture to the entire workforce. When that doesn’t happen, employees who don’t understand the big picture feel more inclined to provide their services elsewhere. “One of the most important predictors of employee commitment, and ultimately loyalty, is the connection between the individual and the big picture,” according to study author Mark Royal, senior consultant at Hay.

Among study findings:

Just 49% of employees are satisfied with the openness and honesty of communications in their companies
42% were not satisfied with the company’s ability to keep them informed about how the business is doing
Among those employees who indicated they were inclined to stay with their employer, 57% were confident in the direction senior leaders communicated
Among those employees inclined to leave the company within two years, only 27 percent said they understood where their companies were headed

There’s plenty of evidence to support the importance of communication between workers and immediate supervisors. But every study I see indicates that executive communication is the dominant factor. You’re wise to employ both.

3. Power To The Press Release

SearchEngineWatch has an intriguing article about search engine optimization (SEO) for PR purposes. The article, by Catherine Seda (author of “Search Engine Advertising”) covers a variety of ways to enhance public relations efforts by making content easier to find. Wal*Mart, for example, created a landing page dealing its anti-unionization efforts and enhanced it so a Google search on the topic ranked it as the number two page dealing with the company’s anti-union stance.

What attracted my attention, though, was the reference to press releases, those venerable PR tools so often misused and so frequently maligned. When they actually contain news and are thought through, though, press releases remain a powerful tool, even in the era of blogs that so many people think can serve as a total press release replacement. SEO-PR President Greg Jarboe, interviewed in the article, pointed to two instances when press releases generated jaw-dropping results. In one case, Southwest Airlines introduced new low fares in a press release that produced $1 million in ticket sales. In another, Verizon saw a 438% increase in the number of searches for “florists” on its website after the company issued a press release about a Valentine’s Day offer.

“Why are press releases so powerful? According to Jarboe’s presentation, Yahoo! News has a unique audience of 24.9 million people and Google News has a unique audience of 7.2 million. Journalists and consumers are turning to the search news channels for information. Plus, optimized press releases appear in the general search results as well. (Beyond Ink managing partner Anne) Kennedy also pointed out, ‘When your press release ranks well in a search engine, you control more real estate on the search results page. That’s one more spot your competition won’t get.’”

The article does reference blogs. Thirty-nine percent of the top 20 search listings for brands appearing in the BusinessWeek 100 brands listing in July 2005 “were derived from consumer-generated media such as blogs.” Thirty-nine percent is impressive, but in no way suggests blogs can replace press releases and the other channels that represent 69% of search engine results.

4. Smart Corporate Blogging

I’ve seen two examples lately of companies with blogs that used them well in response to, and as part of, blogosphere conversations. These are case studies other companies could apply to their own thinking about how to communicate in a networked world.

First came Barbara Krause, principal of Krause Taylor Associates, whose firm came under attack by Yahoo! blogger Jeremy Zawodny. Zawodny accused Krause Taylor of spamming bloggers when he received what appeared to be a clearly off-target email pitch. The original title of the post named Krause Taylor as a PR spammer. Among the many comments the post inspired (most of which took issue with Zawodny’s complaint) were two from Krause Taylor’s client, Six Apart, defending the company. But the best was from Barbara Krause herself:

“We goofed when we sent you the email yesterday about our client’s news and we’re sorry. Here’s what happened. We were sending information about our client’s news to journalists and bloggers who have previously covered related topics, in this case video on demand, portals, AOL. The Yahoo Search Blog’s email address came up and was erroneously included. We try very hard NOT to spam anyone, and we simply made a mistake this time. Our sincere apologies – and you can bet it won’t happen again!”

A simple acknowledgment of a mistake and an apology is a rare approach for a company to take—especially companies with lawyers. But Krause’s response is professional, dignified, and honest. It didn’t satisfy Zawodny, though, who responded that the explanation was “a bit fishy,” so Krause elaborated:

“Here’s the blow by blow description of what happened: We did a search on MediaMap using key words which pertained to the news we were announcing. Those words were video on demand, portals and AOL. The Yahoo Search Blog record came up, presumably because the record contains the word “portal.” That entry was then placed on the list of thirty or so people to whom we were going to send the information. It obviously shouldn’t have been!

“Since then, I did another search on MediaMap specifically on you—and your personal blog and personal email address is also in the database. I am happy to contact MediaMap and try (as others have already apparently tried to do) to get you and the Yahoo Search Blog removed. In fairness to MediaMap, though, they are quite explicit in telling PR professionals that we should not be sending press releases to Yahoo Search Blog, and on your personal entry, it says ‘BEWARE! Proceed with caution when contacting this blogger.’ Good advice!”

That did the trick for Zawodny, who thanked Krause for the details. Krause Taylor winds up looking pretty damn sophisticated and smart—and human. I wonder how many people reading the exchange considered that the agency would be a good one to work with.

Then, more recently, Dan Gillmor points to Pajamas Media, which I reported on here on November 16. The company had launched a journalist blog network and titled it Open Source Media. The announcement brought swift condemnation from the open source community, not to mention a soft-spoken notice that the name was already taken. Rather than resort to lawyers or fight to keep the name, the folks behind the network simply apologized for the oversight and announced they were changing the name back to Pajamas Media. They’ve even updated the post with a friendly response from the owner of the OSM moniker. Here’s a taste of Pajama’s notice:

“We are re-assuming our identity as Pajamas Media. (Just give us a few days to sort the technical issues out.) In short, the whole experience of being caught with our pajamas down has been a bit embarrassing, but in the end, when we realized we could get our beloved name back, we were overjoyed. So a warm, hearty thanks to all of you who expressed your displeasure with our phony identity.”

(The argument could be made that the Pajamas item isn’t really a blog since there’s no feed for the content and no commenting. But it’s a dated post published in reverse chronological order using what appears to be a blogging utility as part of a blog network.)

Two companies that made mistakes that could have cost them reputation instead managed to turn the tables and make themselves look pretty smart and savvy by fessing up to their errors and apologizing to the online community. There’s a lesson here. The only question is whether more entrenched organizations can learn it.

5. Ex-Employee Blogging

Doug Edwards, who was Google’s director of consumer marketing and brand management from 1999 until recently, has been blogging about his former employer for what appears to be the last week or so. The blog, Xooglers (get it? ex-Googlers?), invites other former Google employees to “reminisce and comment on the latest developments in search.” Most of his initial posts recount interviewing for, getting, and starting the job, including this notable excerpt:

“So, now I was Google’s online brand manager. What exactly did that mean? I didn’t have a clue, and evidently no one else did either. It was as if some corporate biological alarm clock had gone off: ‘You know, we’re at that point where we need to have somebody to do all that stuff that’s not engineering. Let’s get us some of them marketing folks. And since the world is divided between online and offline, we’ll get one of each.’

So far, I haven’t found any comments that come from other former Google employees, but the blog’s only been around about a week and may not yet be on xoogler radar screens. Nevertheless, the number of comments is growing and the blog seems to be gaining popularity quickly. Edwards’ candor and writing style don’t hurt.

Ex-employee websites are nothing new, of course. Employees of Enron who had lost their jobs started several sites that served as resources, gathering places, and support. But this is the first time I’ve seen a blog dedicated to discussion of a former employer. While Google hasn’t done anything comparable to Enron’s abuses—and thus would not be likely to inspire the kind of vitriol the ex-Enron sites did—it is a venue where dirty laundry can be aired and a company embarrassed. As the audio clip Adam Curry often plays warns, “There are no secrets, only information you don’t yet have.”

6. A Demo Corporate Blog

There are good corporate blogs and bad ones. Niall Kennedy has seen enough of both to cobble together a demo blog to display the way a business can launch an effective blog dedicated to a product. He selected a real company and product—iRobot’s Scooba—and has developed an impressive blog to show what the company could do and to serve as a model for others considering a blog as part of a marketing effort. (Interestingly, this concept integrates quite well into a larger marketing strategy, contrary to Shel Israel’s contention that blogs don’t fit into an integrated marketing strategy.) Says Kennedy,

“Corporate marketing teams are often a bit afraid to enter the world of corporate blogging. They read reports of mobs of bloggers attacking CBS or Kryptonite and fear for the lives of their brands in the wild frontier that is the blogosphere. Companies are also afraid of creating a huge mistake such as the Juicyfruit blog. I wanted to create a good example for corporate marketers to show how a company can try to connect consumers with information about the products they care about.”

Kennedy’s the community manager at Technorati, so he certainly has the creds to build this site that includes a variety of categories (e.g., announcements, interviews, press coverage) and enough varied types of posts to open a few eyes and minds to the medium’s potential.

You can find the demo blog at http://www.scoobaclean.com.

7. Editorial Pages Attack PR Expenditures

There seems to be a trend emerging in the press: Attack governments that spend money on public relations.

The first example I saw of this comes from California’s Contra Costa County (where I live). The county is facing a budget dilemma and has eliminated several positions and initiated a hiring freeze on several open jobs. Under these circumstances, the supervisors have come under intense fire for the decision to hire a public information officer. The county Fire Department followed suit and is also suffering slings and arrows for its desire to have PR support.

The unions are upset. Even an editorial in the Contra Costa Times (free registration required) urged the board to reconsider:

“It is not just the timing that is bad, the whole concept of a special PR person for the supervisors is bad public policy. County supervisors and other officials can and should speak directly with the press, as they have done in the past. There is no public purpose in hiring someone to filter information and serve as a barrier between county supervisors and the people…We hope the board will come to its senses and shelve the idea of hiring yet another public information officer and that the fire district will come to the same conclusion.”

Next up, a Florida newspaper got into the act. The editorial writers at The Stewart News, a Scripps paper, say, “Martin County needed to get out a lot of information during Hurricane Wilma, but did it have to spend $17,900 with a local PR firm to get it?”

The brief editorial explains the situation, then expresses the editors’ woeful lack of understanding of what is required in a crisis and what professional PR counselors do: “Even if the firm spent seven days on the job, how many people are paid $17,900 for that length of time? The county has people who know how to answer questions, and who would not be at their regular posts during a storm, so why didn’t it use them?”

Fortunately, one of the two comments posted to the online version of the editorial asks the same questions I’m inclined to ask:

“Does anybody in Martin County actually know what a Public Relations spokesman does? Do you know what the bill for a PR person would charge in Ft. Lauderdale? A hell of a lot more than 17K. Complain all you want but remember that this is a service that counties throughout the nation pay to represent them on TV. What if CNN happened to show up in Martin County for a report? Send in some amatuer to open his mouth an say the wrong thing and embarrass the County? THIS is why you hire a professional. Martin County did the right thing by hiring a professional PR person.”

Allen Myers deserves credit for taking the editors to task for their uninformed opinion, but the mere publication of the editorial so soon on the heels of the California example suggests a disturbing trend, all the more confounding considering how much newspapers depend on PR professionals for a majority of the content they publish in their own papers. (I’ve referred here before to a study suggesting that 80% or more of a newspaper’s content originates with a statement, press release, or contact from a spokesperson of some kind.)

8. Who Speaks For The Future Of Print?

Steve Crescenzo and Allan Jenkins are both my friends. Not online friends, but real-world, in-the-flesh friends. I’ve spent time with Allan in Copenhagen. I went to Steve’s wedding. I probably shouldn’t get in the middle of a dust-up between them. My life is filled with things I shouldn’t have done.

Steve takes Allan to task for his contention that print is pretty much useless. In his post, Allan comes down pretty hard on IABC’s “Communication World” magazine, nothing that “Any day of the week, any IABC member can go into the blogosphere and find 50 better articles than CW publishes in a quarter.” Crescenzo counters, “I use the Internet, and I like getting my print copy of Communication World. I think it’s a great benefit. So don’t try to speak for me on this issue, okay?”

Allan took exception to Steve’s characterization of his comments, and the debate has continued. Underlying the dispute, though, is whether print really does have a future. About 12 or 13 years ago, one of the leading business publications (I think it was BusinessWeek, but I wouldn’t swear to it) predicted we were only 10 years away from the paperless office. Three years ago—the point at which offices should have been purely digital—a paper products association reported that the average office consumed 30% more paper than it did a decade ago. If you work online, you know why: You’re constantly printing emails and web pages because holding that piece of paper in your hand makes the content more readable than it is on the screen.

Of course, there are some who prefer reading on the screen. Allan is one; my podcasting co-host Neville Hobson is another. Neville has cancelled all his print magazine subscriptions, opting to read everything online. And, of course, there are those who argue that the generation of digital natives ultimately will sound the death knell for print, since they’ve grown up reading computer screens unlike us digital immigrants, who had to get accustomed to it. (And there’s a lot to get accustomed to: glowing light, reading across instead of down, reading a document the dimensions of which are wider than they are tall…the list goes on.) I don’t buy it for a minute. There are few digital natives more in tune with the online world than my 16-year-old daughter, Rachel, who manages a dozen or more instant messages while listening to online music, engaging in a three-way phone call, watching TV, and doing her homework. Several years ago, when “The Wizard of Oz” was re-released in a digitally remastered print, I took her to see the classic at a gorgeous, refurbished one-screen movie theater in San Francisco’s Castro district. She was knocked out and wanted to read one of the books. Being the dedicated nerd that I am, I refused to buy a copy of a public-domain book, so I visited the Gutenberg Archive (a volunteer effort that long preceded Google Print in its effort to make books and other literature available online) and downloaded one of L. Frank Baum’s novels. I loaded it onto Rachel’s computer. The next day, I came home to find her reading the book in hard copy; she had printed out all 500 or so pages.

“Why in the world did you do that?” I asked.

She looked at me as though I was a clueless moron (the older she gets, the more I get that look): “You didn’t expect me to read a novel on the screen, did you?” she said.

Exactly. The problems with extended reading on the screen have nothing to do with generational differences. It’s physiological. Besides, there are plenty of characteristics unique to print you just don’t get online:

Portability -— I still don’t see people taking their laptops to the beach or the bathroom. Cell phones, yes, but not laptops. Nor have I had any luck reading my laptop in bed. I heard one speaker complain that whenever he tried to lay back in bed and read his laptop, the lid would close on his nose. I still see more people reading newspapers on BART than laptops.
Permanence -— I can delete this post tomorrow and it’ll be gone. If you print it and file it in a manila file folder, you’ll be able to retrieve it in 50 years and read it.
You can write on it. The only way you can make notes in the margin of an online document is to print it out.
Substance -— There’s something nice about the tactile feel of something solid in your hands.
Quality -— The best designed online annual report still looks like other online annual reports. In print, you can use high-end paper stock and class-A printing with foil stamps and blind embossing and other design elements to reflect the organization’s substance.
It works when the power’s out.

Think about it; you’ll probably come up with other characteristics of print that appeal to you. There’s a reason so many websites offer a printable version of the material they offer.

So no, I don’t think print’s going anywhere anytime soon. The plummeting subscription rates newspapers are experiencing have nothing to do with the fact that they’re produced in print; it’s a consequence of content that hasn’t transitioned to take advantage of print’s strengths. Most newspapers will make that adjustment; some won’t. But in the end, remember that new media never kill old media. Old media adapt and, in some cases, shrink. But they continue to offer value as long as they play to their strengths.

9. Sites of the Month
.....................

Play MP3s Directly From Your Site

A bit of Javascript from del.icio.us will let visitors to your website or blog play any MP3 file just by clicking the link. Visitors to the For Immediate Release podcast blog are able to listen to a stream of the show thanks to a Java applet called Wimpy, but this is far simpler, free, and seems to work great. The code even lets visitors to your site tag and post the MP3 to del.icio.us. I feel a test of the Playtagger coming on…

Note: The instructions on the del.icio.us page have you pasting the Javascript code between the

and tags, but the page’s own source code has the Javascript between the and

tags. Adding the Javascript code will add the link to every MP3 on your page.

http://del.icio.us/help/playtagger

Add Your Voice To Your E-mail

Waxmail makes it dead easy to record an audio email from directly within Microsoft Outlook. The free edition includes an ad in the email, but the ad is for Waxmail itself. Give it a try; it’s great.

ttp://www.waxmail.biz

10. HC+T Update

Shel will work with the National Geographic Society’s external communication staff on an approach to blogging for the Society.
Shel presents material on intranet best practices and the application of new social media internally at The Walt Disney Company.
Shel presents his “Writing for the Wired World” workshop for a division of Johnson & Johnson.

11. Boilerplate And Subscription Information
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You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!

Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

Posted by Shel on 11/27 at 04:41 PM
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Monday, October 24, 2005

HC+T Update: October 2005

The October 2005 email newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology, in blog/RSS format.

HC+T Update
October 2005

Ten guidelines for B2B podcasting
Research supports role of leader communication
Liar, liar
Unbelievable blogging stats unveiled
Does Weblogs acquisition herald a reintegration of the web?
Can blogs turn a film into a blockbuster?
Video iPod won’t kill podcasting
Google takes to a blog for issues management
Site of the Month
HC+T Update
Boilerplate And Subscription Information

1. Ten Guidelines for B2B Podcasting

In my “Writing for the Wired World” workshops, I begin by pointing out a fundamental difference between business websites and everything else on the web. When you build a family site (birthday party pictures and the like) or a fan site (if you love your Mini Cooper, for instance) or a performance art site (fun with Flash, for example), your visitors are happy to click here and there to see what you’re offering. When people come to a business site, however, they know exactly what they want. With laser-like intensity, they will zero in (or, at least, try to) on the answer to their question, the solution to their problem. Visitors to business sites have agendas. They’re not interested in following any links that won’t get them to what brought them.

Similar distinctions apply to business podcasting -– particularly B2B podcasting, where your customer is another business instead of an individual customer or consumer. There’s no point in pretending to be “Dawn and Drew” when your audience has come for useful business content. (Besides, if they want to listen to “Dawn and Drew,” they can. )

That said, it’s also worth noting that your listeners spend most of their time listening to podcasts other than yours. There are podcasting practices you should learn and adhere to that, so far, many business podcasts are ignoring. Most busines podcasts, for example, don’t have associated blogs. More on that later.

Not that there are a lot of B2B podcasts out there yet. I count maybe half a dozen (from Oracle, Jupiter, Eric Schwartzman, and BMC Software, for example). But podcasting is exploding and businesses are going to figure out sooner rather than later that a podcast could be a useful B2B communication channel.

With that in mind, I started jotting down some guidelines for B2B podcasting. As luck would have it, I wound up with 10:

Be relevant

If you’re considering a B2B podcast, you’ve probably already given some consideration to a theme and an audience. One of the no-brainer podcasts no business has A podcast for this audience helps elevate your content above the dozens or even hundreds of other companies sending content through traditional channels. It’s not enough to just focus on this audience; you have to add some value. You don’t need to disclose material information for this podcast to be relevant, but you should offer insights into why your organization is a worthy investment. You might, for instance, pick a focus of your R&D efforts and give it a bit more attention that usual, talk about customer satisfaction metrics, or conduct an interview with one of your thought leaders.

Stick to the point

Under some circumstances, you might be tempted to use your podcast to address issues that have reared their ugly heads. It’s easy to view the podcast as a broad business communication tool. It’s not. Podcasting is all about narrowcasting, particularly when you’re dealing with a business audience. Resist the temptation to digress or risk losing an audience that listens because of the highly focused content you deliver. Consider IBM’s podcast, which delves into the future of some aspect of life (homes, cars, shopping) through the eyes of two company thought leaders on the subject. How many people would unsubscribe if IBM used an episode to explain its labor issues? That’s not why people subscribed.

Avoid fluff

I’ve heard some comments recently suggesting that business podcasts should be more entertaining. One pundit went so far as to suggest that business podcasts should play songs. Don’t you believe it. Someone who listens to the IBM podcast wants to know what the future holds and they want to hear it from experts working on real-world applications. Listeners to my podcast may argue, “You play music.” Yes, Neville and I play a podsafe tune at the end of every show. But we’re not a B2B podcast; there is no business behind our show. (We’re just two guys doing a podcast.) We also save the music for the end of the show, so those who don’t want to hear music can stop listening when the music starts. (Incidentally, we play music to support the independent artists whose efforts are one of the biggest drivers of podcasting and because it’s our show and we want to.)

Be infotaining

While you don’t want to turn your B2B podcast into a top 40 music show, you do want to employ enough entertainment elements to make it interesting to listen to. Solid content is not compelling if it is delivered by a lone monotonous voice. Use musical intros and outros, introduce new features, and generally take advantage of the medium. Adopt a format for your show. “For Immediate Release” is a co-hosted discussion with audio commentary from other sources. You could do an interview show, a panel discussion, or commentary by company thought leaders. Listeners get to like a format. They also like it if you shake it up from time to time.

Build and engage community

There’s a podcasting myth that suggests one of podcasting’s great limitations is its one-way, top-down nature. Hogwash. Podcasts routinely build communities of listeners the members of which interact with the podcaster. Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code offers a great example. Curry expressed an interest in biodiesel and asked for input. Listeners sent what they knew by email and audio comment. Other listeners commented on what the first round of listeners said. Curry responded and asked more questions. The biodiesel discussion has been going on for weeks on DSC. Neville and I have worked hard to make “For Immediate Release” listener-driven, with as much as half of each show based on themes raised by our listeners.

There are no competitors…okay, there are some competitors

If you spend your time bashing your competitors, your listeners will unsubscribe in droves. They’re coming for insights, not an us-vs.-them commercial. As my mother (and yours, too, probably) used to say, if you can’t say something nice about somebody, don’t say anything. In fact, if a competitor introduces a podcast or says something worthwhile in a blog, point to it. Neville and I don’t see the growing number of PR-focused podcasts as competition. We even link to them in what we call our “podroll,” a list of other communication-themed podcasts on our show blog. Just because your audience is made up of customers doesn’t mean you shouldn’t recognize the interconnectedness of the medium and your listeners’ hunger for useful and interesting content.

Not that I think Boston Consulting Group would ever welcome a new podcast by McKinsey & Company into the podosphere. Short of that, though, it pays dividends to be part of a bigger podcasting community.

Don’t advertise or sell

Nobody wants to subscribe to and download a commercial. You can brand your product, service, or company by being the provider of useful information. You should avoid turning your podcast into an advertisement at all costs, regardless of what your throwback marketing VP wants.

Be authentic

Businesses often are inclined to overproduce their media, striving to be as good as – or better than – mainstream public media. I remember talking to the manager of one company’s video production operation who said his baseline was a local newscast; his work could never, no matter what, be worse than a typical local newscast. While podcast listeners do want to be entertained, their primary interest is in content, not polish. A podcast hosted by voice talent reading a script will be dismissed, while listening to a real engineer or designer or brand manager -– replete with all his “ums” and “uhs” -– will be compelling, as long as he’s talking about something the listener cares about. (Besides, you can edit out the worst mistakes.)

Be mindful of your listeners’ time

Depending on whom you talk to, podcasts shouldn’t exceed 20 or 40 minutes. Neville and I routinely run 70 to 80 minutes. But again, while “The Hobson and Holtz Report” is about business, it’s not from a business. With a business podcast, you’re asking your customer (or prospective customer) to give her attention to your organization’s content. It’s an exchange. Don’t ask for too much of it. Make sure you fill the time you do have with something useful enough to make the exchange worthwhile.

Integrate your podcast into the blogosphere

Outside the pseudo podcasts from the mainstream media (repackaged pre-broadcast radio content), you’ll be hard-pressed to find a podcast that doesn’t have an associated blog. So far, most of the business podcasts haven’t emulated this practice with the exception of GM, where the Fastlane podcast is just part of the Fastlane blog. Your podcast blog page contains show notes, another tactic common among indie podcasters but missing from businesses. Listeners appreciate the hell out of good show notes. Most important, but inviting comments on each show, you more effectively build that community of listeners naysayers insist you can’t build with a podcast.

As I said at the beginning, I’m sure I’ve overlooked some important guidelines. What have I missed?

2. Reserach supports role of leader communication

I must live right.

I was preparing to conduct a post-session interview for a Conference Board podcast when I heard a remark from one of the panelists that made me sit up straight and lean forward. Afterward, I approached the speaker and asked to interview him for the conference podcast series. Of course, the focus of my interview was this one remark.

The speaker was Charles Watts, principal of Towers Perrin and leader of the consulting firm’s Change Implementation practice. Watts notes that the practice focuses on reseach and communication around change management. Watts referred to a study Towers Perrin conducted among 40,000 workers in large companies. The researchers examined nine items that comprise employee engagement and compared the results to the other 100 or so items included in the survey. The result: The item that best explained whether an employee is willing to invest discretionary effort in the company’s success is the one that reads, “To what extent do you believe senior leadership takes an interest in your well being?”

As Watts put it, if employees have a sense that their welfare matters to senior management, they are more willing to invest in the company and do good work.

The channels for this communication do not involve the immediate supervisor. Interestingly, face-to-face engagement with senior leaders is the most popular form of communication, according to another major Towers Perrin study, and technology plays a significant role through video and webcasts. The results did not vary among different employee groups; even the employees on the factory floor indicated that they “want to hear from the source that the right things are being done to build the success of the company,” Watts told me.

This does not mean there is no role for the immediate supervisor; it’s just a different role, Watts said. “Am I getting the rewards I deserve, am I developing my career, am I getting the learning and development opportunities I should. These kinds of basics” are what employees seek from their immediate supervisors, the “bread and butter” issues, according to Watts.

In his reply to my critique of his belief that the immediate supervisor should be the sole source of communication during change, Dr. T.J. Larkin suggested that I believe that “communicators should do a little bit of everything.” I believe no such thing. Rather, I believe communicators should use the channels that will, in combination, produce the desired results. In communicating change, it is clear that employees want and need to hear from senior executives for some messages and immediate supervisors for others. It’s not a matter of picking one over the other, but instead a matter of ensuring the complete message is delivered through each channel.

Incidentally, you can hear this and otherinterviews from The Conference Board at:
http://www.conference-board.org/rss/cct_conference/rss.xml

3. Liar, Liar

The next time Apple CEO Steve Jobs says, “No, we’re not working on anything like that,” expect to hear laughter. Nothing Jobs says about product development will ever have any credibility since Jobs proudly unveiled the video iPod.

For months, Jobs has been more than dismissive of the idea of a video iPod; he has been contemptuously dismissive. On Business 2.0’s B2Day blog, you can read many of his comments indicating Apple would not release such a product. For example: “We don’t think people have a burning desire to watch video on tiny little screens.” Maybe he had his fingers crossed behind his back.

According to Stephen Baker at Blogspotting, Jobs has also rankled a lot of Apple fans by holding back on the video iPod in order to boost sales of the Nano. Now a bunch of consumers are stuck with tiny music players when they’d rather have the video version. Nanos are cropping up all over eBay, many presumably offered by those who would like to recoup their investment so they can afford the more desirable video player. Leading the charge is A-list blogger Jeff Jarvis, who suggests that Apple “screwed” its community.

Apple innovates some fine products, but it’s also a case study in throwback communications. Consider its approach to employees who leaked product information: Sue the bloggers who published the information to reveal the employees’ names. Now compare that to Sun’s approach: Get your highest ranking executive blogger, President Jonathan Schwartz, to publish a public appeal to employees to stop leaking information and explain the reason why. Sun is progressive and transparent and treats employees like adults. Apple gets mad and sues.

Even Todd Cochrane at Geek News Central has taken Apple to task for its practices, dubbing it a “communications black hole:”

“Apple does not communicate, Apple does not have a person that publishes their cell phone number on their blog that I can call and get clarifications on or bitch about something that has made me mad. Guess what Microsoft does!...Black Hole communicating is what I am going to start referring to Apple’s development and support teams. Comments and e-mails go in nothing comes out.”

Does financial success mean a company has no need to communicate effectively? Does being the darling of the technology sector excuse arrogance and a one-way, top-down, secretive communication philosophy in an era of transparency and conversation? Or is the day coming when Apple will reap what it has sown?

4. Unbelievable Blogging Stats Unveiled

According to the results of a study released at the BlogOn conference in New York, 55% of corporations are blogging internally, externally, or both. Guidewire Group’s BlogOn 2005 Social Media Adoption Survey suggests 91.4% of these corporations are using blogs internally and 96.6% externally.

If you believe these results, I have the deed to a nice bridge we should talk about.

I’m not the only one who bashed the results; they were roundly dismissed throughout the blogosphere. Constantin Basturea posted four specific questions about the survey on his blog, “PR Meets WWW,” and Mike Sigal, co-founder and CEO of Guidewire, replied. He said the survey’s goal was to explore why and how corporations were adopting blogs. “That’s why we promoted the survey via press release and to the blogosphere…because we wanted folks who were blogging to answer it.” That’s the problem, though, isn’t it? If the response base is skewed to those with blogs, you’ll wind up with an absurd number like 55% saying their companies have blogs. And then the company positioned it as 55% of corporations having blogs, not 55% of respondents working for corporations with blogs.

Constantin also asked about the guarantee that those who took the survey were in the position of knowing the information they provided. Sigal’s reply? “No guarantee. That’s why we were explicit about the sample and methodology.”

It would be nice to see a legitimate, scientific study of, say, the Fortune 1000. I remember such studies dealing with intranet adoption about a decade ago. In the meantime, we’re stuck with this nonsense. Nevertheless, there are some interesting numbers deeper in the study. For example, among those companies responding that actually do have intranet blogs, the predominant use is knowledge sharing (63%) and internal communications (44%). About 60% of those with external blogs have more than one and 17% have more than five.

Interestingly, the biggest problem business bloggers face is maintaining enthusiasm.

5. Does Weblogs Acquisition Herald a Reintegration of the Web?

In workshops and talks, I’ve been suggesting that the web has become balkanized. Three separate entities have emerged:

The “reference web”—The traditional web where people go to extract information. Characterized by the receiver-driven model of communication, it’s all about pulling what you want when you want it.
The “collaborative web”—Social media, consumer-generated content, conversations. This is made up of wikis, blogs, social networking sites, tag-driven sites, and the like.
The “broadband web”—Sites enabled entirely by the prevalence of high-speed access, including vlogs, vidcasts, and podcats.

Of course, these are all websites in the end, and all part of the World Wide Web. However, only in rare cases are blogs (for example) just one element of a larger site. In nearly all cases, the blog is the site. The blogosphere is an entity unto itself, separate and distinct from the rest of the web. Compare that to message boards which, in nearly all cases, have been subordinate elements of a larger reference website. Similarly, Wikipedia is its own site as is TheNewPR. Rocketboom is just a vidcast with supporting links. They are distinct from traditional reference web content.

I have also been suggesting that this balkanization is temporary, that these three elements of the web will eventually reintegrate. I’ve been guessing that this would take three to five years, but the news that AOL had acquired Jason Calacanis’ blog network Weblogs may lead me to accelerate my estimate. While AOL insists that Weblogs will continue to operate independently as a wholly owned subsidiary, AOL is planning to integrate the blogs into its web portal by linking to specific entries. For example, according to one report, “Visitors to AOL’s Moviefone, for instance, might see referrals to Weblogs’ Cinematical blog on films.” Hence the blogs become an element of a larger, more traditional website.

Whether this is good, bad, or neutral is something we can debate endlessly. For instance, it’ll be harder to quantify what the buzz within the blogosphere or its influence when blogs are subsumed back into the overall web. Either way, the AOL acquisition may signal the beginning of this inevitable reintegration.

6. Can Blogs Turn a Film into a Blockbuster?

Joss Whedon, whose “Firefly” TV series didn’t last a season, convinced a studio to produce a feature-length motion picture based on the series when DVD sales went through the roof. Still, the band of sci-fi fans who scooped up the DVD represent a fraction of the audience necessary to make the movie profitable. Whedon, who had a long, successful run with his series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (after the original film he scripted fared less well), wasn’t content to hope word-of-mouth and a strong, traditional ad campaign would boost ticket sales. He turned to the blogosphere.

Or, at least, somebody associated with the film—dubbed “Serenity” (the name of the spaceship) turned to the blogosphere, and used an A-list blogger to serve as a kind of online Pied Piper. According to a blog at KnoxNews, the online version of the Knoxville News Sentinel, InstaPundit’s Glenn Reynolds had 150 tickets to an advance screening of the film available for local bloggers. News Sentinel blogger Michael Silence notes, “it’s a chance to blog a review on the new movie, due out Sept. 30. It’s also sound marketing for movie studios. If you want to go, confirm in my comments.”

There were plenty of enthusiastic confirmations, like this one: “I’m delerious with the possibility of two tickets? Why? ...I’ve got every episode of Buffy on video and DVD, and every episode of ‘Firefly,’ the basis for ‘Serenity.’ See my Camera Obscura post on my blog regarding creator Joss Whedon (Sept. 9th) and the Buffy convention in Knoxville.” Can you imagine the review this guy was going to write? Add another 149 similarly-inclined sci-fi fanatics and Buffy fans, and you have the potential to build some genuine buzz.

A quick search of Technorati turned up one other screening -— already held -— in which Grace Hill Media swapped Serenity tickets in exchange for blogged reviews. (Grace Hill is a media company that helps “Hollywood reach people of faith.”) One suspects there will be a few more such outreach efforts before the film debuts. This notion of turning to the blogosphere to promote books and movies isn’t new, but we can expect to see it become more institutionalized as the payoff becomes more evident. Why give your free screening tickets to anybody passing by when you can focus on bloggers with far greater reach and influence?

7. Video iPod Won’t Kill Podcasting

Over at the BusinessWeek Blogspotting blog, Heather Green recounts a conversation with an advertising exec who wondered if BW would reconsider its coverage of podcasting in the wake of Apple’s introduction of a video iPod. This advertising exec fails to understand that new media don’t kill old media. And in this case, the old medium (if you can consider podcasting old at 14 months) doesn’t even need to adapt since the vast majority of content delivered in podcasts wouldn’t lend itself to video.

Look at most people using their iPods. Most of the time, they’re not sitting still. They’re on the move, walking down the street, driving their cars, working out, doing their jobs. Audio’s great virtue is the ability to listen to it while you’re doing something else. This isn’t a concept new to the digital era; Sony didn’t choose to call their groundbreaking portable cassette player the “Sitman,” after all. Video, like text, on the other hand, doesthat you sit and concentrate on the medium to the exclusion of all other input. (At least, I hope to God I don’t see people watching their video iPods while cruising along at 65 miles per hour, even though I do see my fair share of idiots with newspapers draped over their steering wheels.)

While podcasting’s star is still rising, the video iPod does open the door to an explosion of vidcasts. Detaching vidcasts from the computer heightens their desirability: The idea of loading Rocketboom onto an iPod to watch on the plane or the bus is very appealing. I expect to see more and more vidcasts as a complement to—not a replacement of—podcasts.

Heather agrees, by the way:

“...podcasting has energized what we used to think of as radio and helped broaden the appeal of listening. Watching of course will be popular, but it’s different.”

8. Google Takes to a Blog for Issues Management

While most companies struggle to figure out blogs’ role in the communication mix, Google has figured out that blogging is the best way to present its position on policy issues. An article in PRWeek praises Google’s recognition that blogs—while not the channel for reporting earnings—represent a better means of getting information quickly into the hands of analysts, media, and influencers. The article quotes Michael Robinson, vice president with Levick Strategic Communications: “This is where Google lives and breathes. The world is moving so quickly now. The ability to get out there and tell your side of the story before rumors overwhelm the marketplace is critical.”

Leave it to Mike Manuel, though, to point out the shortcomings of Google’s blogs: The blogs don’t allow comments, enabling “Google to talk about sensitive issues and protects it from a controversial conversation, as there’s no way for readers to talk back.” (http://http://mmanuel.typepad.com/media_guerrilla/)

Agreed. On the other hand, any example of blogging as an issues management tool is welcome, if for no other reason than to be able to say, “Yes, you can” when lawyers at other organizations suggest, “You can’t do that.” And if one of those lawyers suggests that Google’s attorneys must not be happy about it, you can always point out that Google’s lawyers are among those posting to the blog.

Google’s blog—http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

9. Sites of the Month

So you like the idea of a wiki, but you don’t want to download and install one and you don’t want to pay to use one of the hosted alternatives. You could try the free Writeboard, a new entry into the world of wikis from 37Signals. Visit the site, complete a brief online form, and you’ll have a wiki up and running that’s pretty darned easy to use.

http://www.writeboard.com

Setting your RSS newsreader to ping your subscribed feeds every five minutes just isn’t fast enough for you, eh? You might want to try a new free product from a company called KnowNow. eLerts—which is beta (of course; what isn’t?)—installs a button to your Internet Explorer toolbar. Once installed, it synchs up with a background service that that monitors your feeds. As soon as a feed is updated, you get an alert on your toolbar. Adding subscriptions is a matter of dragging one of those ubiquitous orange boxes into the “add channel” field on your toolbar—no need for a newsreader. It’s not an aggregator, though; clicking on an alert takes you to the website that contains the new content. I suspect it’s best for feeds that are critical, not the 1,500 you review every morning; it complements instead of replaces a newsreader. eLerts is only available for the PC, and I’m on the road with my PowerBook, so I’ll install this on my desktop when I get back to the office so I can take it out for a spin. You’re also out of luck if you use only Firefox, although I suspect that a Firefox version is inevitable if the product takes off. As for a business model, KnowNow plans to offer branded versions for companies.

http://download.knownow.com

10. HC+T Update

>>>Shel has inked a retainer agreement with a major global software company to provide intranet consulting.

>>>Shel is helping a major product company develop a portal that will unite the company’s various operating units.

>>>Shel has been selected again as a speaker at the IABC International Conference, set for June 2006 in Vancouver. He’ll be on the “All-Stars” track one more time.

11. Boilerplate And Subscription Information

You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

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HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
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Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

Posted by Shel on 10/24 at 04:17 PM
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Monday, September 26, 2005

HC+T Update: September 2005

The September 2005 email newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology, blog/RSS format.

HC+T Update
September 2005

1) I’m Back
2) How Legitimate Is Anonymous Blogging?
3) What’s In Most Online Newsrooms?
4) More Than Half Of Journalists Use Blog
5) The Ethics Of Attention
6) Are Trackbacks Conversations?
7) Non-reporter Sends Field Report For Podcast
8) Geeking Out On OPML
9) Site of the Month
10) HC+T Update
11) Boilerplate And Subscription Information

1. I’m Back

Somehow, I completely missed my August issue.

That’s never happened before. In the nine years I’ve produced this email newsletter, I have never missed an issue. Even when I was concurrently producing “NetGain Update,” I never missed an issue. But August was an unusually busy month and it was already September when the thought crept into my mind: “I never produced an Update.”

I have spent the last month consumed with guilt (even though I didn’t receive one single message asking, “Hey, what the hell happened to your August newsletter?”). I have been determined not to let this happen again. So here is the October “HC+T Update,” and it’s not even the last day of the month.

I promise never to miss an issue again. Honest.

2. How Legitimate Is Anonymous Blogging?

I recently caused a lot of grief. I posted an item on my blog about anonymous bloggers, taking aim squarely at “Deep Background,” a government communicator who had started blogging for Ragan Communications. Despite the fact that a hefty portion of my income comes from Ragan, I slammed the anonymity factor pretty hard. Shortly after that, the blogger resigned, afraid of being “outed.”

I had no issue with the blogger himself (whoever he was), just the fact that he wouldn’t identify himself. A lot of people agreed with me, but a roughly equal number took issue. Several pointed to a blog written by an anonymous bouncer in a New York nightclub. That, however, is apples an oranges. Nobody is going to make career decisions based on the advice the bouncer presents. Several might, however, make work decisions based on the advice of a government communicator touted by an authority like Ragan Communications.

Here’s my issue:

Before this latest blog, Ragan hosted two blogs that aren’t bad at all. In fact, I praised Steve Crescenzo’s “Corporate Hallucinations” as one of the funnier blogs you can read. And David Murray’s blog, “The Speechwriter’s Slant,” has its moments. But “Deep Background…”

The “about” link on the blog told us that Deep Background “is a blog for local, state and federal government media professionals. We cover strategies, tactics, non-political issues and other practical matters that are useful to government communicators.” The author, we learn, “has been a government public information officer at the national and local level for 18 years.” Beyond that, we knew nothing. The blog’s banner made it clear that the contents of “Deep Background” are “straight from the mouth of a senior level, unidentified source.” Get it? He’s on deep background.

Except, of course, for the fact that this is a blog and anonymous blogging —- especially when the blog is brought to you by a media organization -— makes about as much sense as casting a vote with invisible ink. Where’s the credibility of an anonymous blogger? When readers comment, to whom are the comments directed? Neville Hobson raised this issue when he first read the complaints by an anonymous blogger about his Land Rover experience. Neville’s observation about the lack of credibility inherent in anonymity led the blogger to reveal his identity (and, lo and behold, his credibility soared).

There are rare exceptions. Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation suggested an anonymous blog for people who just have to complain about work but don’t want their bosses to identify them. But even then, if you can’t identify the company about which they’re whining, what’s the point of reading the blog? (Perhaps these anonymous bloggers fill in their friends and family so at least somebody knows who the target of their poison keyboard really is.) In general, though, anonymous blogs are a lot like character blogs. In fact, a blog like this could actually BE a character blog. For all we know, it’s a Ragan staffer penning this blog, pretending to be a senior level government official with 18 years experience.

So, what do you think? Is there any credibility for you in anonymous blogs that provide subject matter expertise? Let me know your thoughts and I’ll publish them in the next issue.

3. What’s In Most Online Newsrooms?

Does your company need to beef up its online newsroom? After perusing a report from the Communications department at IBM’s Spanish operation, you may think so.

Online newsrooms —- sections of a company’s website dedicated to providing resources to the press -— have been de rigueur on the web. Some, like General Electric’s, are models. Others are nothing more than collections of press releases. (It’s been some 30 years since I was a newspaper reporter, but try as I might, I just can’t remember a time when I needed an old press release.) There have been numerous studies in which reporters and editors were asked to rank the most important elements of an online newsroom (contact information invariably tops the list). But now, thanks to communicators working for IBM’s operation in Spain, there’s a detailed report exploring what companies from around the world actually offer in their newsrooms.

The 118-page bilingual (Spanish and English) report—available for download as a PDF—analyzes sites from well over 100 companies in the US and Europe (along with one Asian country, Singapore), examining each on 51 different metrics. While the study didn’t ask whether these sites offered RSS feeds, they did check into the general notion of subscribing to content, along with the usual elements, like press releases, contact information, and photos. It also looks at the ability to submit inquiries and how quickly media relations staff responds.

It’s surprising, given the number of bad pressrooms I’ve seen, how many of those included in the report offer so many desired elements. The companies studied are listed at the end of the report, so it’s easy to point to samples you can use to bolster your argument for enhancing your newsroom with features they have that yours doesn’t. And it never hurts to be able to say, “By the way, of the newsrooms studied, 66 offer backgrounders and reports (or whatever).”

Download “Best Practices in Public Relations: An Analysis of Online Press Rooms in Leading Companies Round the World” at http://www-5.ibm.com/es/press/notas/julio/bestpractices.pdf.

4. More Than Half Of Journalists Use Blog

So only 11% of all Internet users read blogs, according to Pew Internet and American Life study. If you think that means blogs wield little influence, you need to break those numbers down. Among that 11% are are a lot of journalists, 51% according to an annual study of media’s use of the Net. And 28% rely on blogs for their day-to-day reporting.

It’s no great stretch to conclude that blogs are influencing the content that gets into the mainstream media.

The Survey of Media has been going on for some time; I cited it in the first edition of my book, “Public Relations on the Net,” which was published in 1999, and it already had five years’ worth of data at that point. Columbia University’s Dr. Steven Ross has been with the study since it started, partnering with Don Middleberg of New York’s Middleberg Public Relations. According to Ross—who is also a partner in Euro RSCG Magnet (which acquired Middleberg):

“As blogs continue to gain in popularity, quality and influence, it is becoming imperative that journalists and journalism students continue to integrate blogs, especially blogs that cover technology, into their reporting practices. A number of credible and influential Weblogs – such as Scobleizer, Gizmodo, and Boing Boing –- provide an invaluable trove of research, story ideas, and other information that current and future journalists would be remiss not to leverage in their reporting.”

You can retrieve a PDF file of the slides presented by EURO RSCG Magnet at the launch of the 11th Survey of the media at the following URL:

http://jackie.dvcotechnology.com/magnet_media/file.php/binaries/23/FinalDeck.pdf

5. The Ethics Of Attention

There is a commodity that is at the core of our work in the communications field, and the related fields of marketing and advertising. Without this commodity, we could never hope to wield influence. Unlike oil, it is a resource that will always exist, yet it is finite; there is only so much of it to go around. This commodity is attention.

In an information/knowledge economy, attention is at the heart of just about everything. If people pay attention, you have a shot at getting your message across. If they don’t, if they choose to focus their attention elsewhere, you might as well be firing your messages into deep space. What’s more, given the nature of the Net, you can identify what people are paying attention to and use that information.

It’s interesting to reflect on the term “pay attention.” “Pay” suggests some kind of barter arrangement. When I pay money for something, I expect to get something in return, whether it’s a pack of chewing gum, a new laptop, a novel, whatever. When I pay heed, I also expect something in return, such as information of value. As more and more organizations jockey to attract the attention of key audiences, what are they giving in return? Are they even thinking in terms of an exchange? And what of those organizations that use services like Technorati and PubSub to identify where people are focusing their attention in order to use it to better hone their own messages? Are they employing any ethical guidelines to their application of the information they obtain?

These questions are new to the information age, but a non-profit organization has been launched to advocate on behalf of the people who own the commodity organizations crave. AttentionTrust maintains that individuals own themselves, their data, and their attention. Further, this ownership assumes certain rights:

Property—You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish. You have control.
Mobility—You can securely move your attention wherever you want whenever you want to. You have the ability to transfer your attention.
Economy—You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Your attention has worth.
Transparency—You can see exactly how your attention is being used. You can decide who you trust.

AssociationTrust defines attention, in part, as

“...the substance of focus. It registers your interests by indicating choice for certain things and choice against other things. Any time you pay attention to something (and any time you ignore something), data is created. That data has value, but only if it’s gathered, measured, and analyzed. Right now, you generally lack the ability to capture that data for yourself, so you can’t benefit from it. But what if you could? And what if you could share your data with other people, who were also capturing their own data, or if you could exchange your data for something of value with companies and other institutions that were interested in learning more about the things that interested you? You’d be in control—you would decide who has access to what data, as well as what you’d accept in exchange for access to your data.”

The site also includes links to some research and writing on the subject of attention.

The mission of AttentionTrust isn’t clear, and its activities aren’t defined, but the association is inviting memberships for those who are willing to abide by the four principles. In any case, this is no fly-by-night group. The volunteer board includes the likes of ZDNet columnist and attention advocate Steve Gillmor (president), Nick Bradbury, designer of the FeedDemon RSS newsreader, Seth Goldstein, Clay Shirky, and Mary Hodder, among others. Since there’s no dollar figure attached to membership (other than a suggested $25 donation), I’m signing up if for no other reason than to see what comes next.

More information is at http://www.attentiontrust.org

6. Are Trackbacks Conversations?

On his MicroPersuasion blog, Steve Rubel’s posted his reason for rejecting a trackback from Jeremy Pepper. That post produced a blizzard of comments —- 26, along with three trackbacks, at last count. In case you missed it, here’s the story in a nutshell: Jeremy posted an item in May about PR’s role in customer service. Steve posted a related topic last week. Jeremy went back to his post and updated it with a trackback to Steve’s new new post. Steve rejected the trackback, noting, “A trackback is a continuation of a dialogue, not a traffic-building gimmick” and “this tactic is bordering on trackback spam” and finally “This is about following blog etiquette.”

(In case you don’t know what a trackback is, here’s the Wikipedia definition: “TrackBack is a mechanism used in a blog that shows a list of entries in other blogs that refer to a post on the first blog.”

I’m not about to criticize either Steve or Jeremy. Micropersuasion is Steve’s blog and he can do with it as he pleases. But he raises two interesting issues that are worth a few sentences. First is the assertion that “a trackback is a continuation of a dialogue.” I know that dictionary and encyclopedia entries are of limited use in a discussion like this, but I checked out Wikipedia anyway and found no reference to dialogue. Wikipedia defines a trackback as “a mechanism used in a blog that shows a list of entries in other blogs that refer to a post on the first blog.” So the question becomes whether a trackback is, indeed, a continuation of a dialogue. My definitive answer: It depends.

Sure, it could be, if the blogger creating the trackback intended it that way. But I can’t uncover any requirement that it assume the characteristics of a conversation. As I see it, a post to a blog is dated, but it is also permanent (hence the notion of a permalink). Jeremy’s post may have appeared in March, but if I searched the right combination of terms, that five-month-old post could appear at the top of a Google query. In this sense, it’s not only a blog post, but an article that could be useful to somebody conducting research. As such, I find no breech of etiquette in an effort to keep the post current. Some argue that Jeremy should have added some text; Steve thinks he should have produced an entirely new post. These may have been good ideas, but on the other hand, the addition of the trackback is, as an integral part of the post itself, an update.

In any case, I don’t believe this use of trackback has anything to do with dialogue, nor does it need to.

I might question Jeremy’s motives if the trackback had no connection to the theme of Steve’s post, but in fact they were directly related. And while I don’t know it for a fact, I seriously doubt Jeremy would even consider using Micropersuasion to build traffic for his own blog. But that’s only because I know the guy. Ultimately, the issue comes down to currency. Is the revision of an old post with updated links a legitimate practice? I think it is, by virtue of the fact that the post will continue to stand on its own as a permalink.

The second issue that arises out of the debate is whether there is any defined blog etiquette at this point. While a Google search reveals nearly 15,000 posts containing the term, a quick review of the top posts reveals most are bloggers offering up their own opinions. It’s not like email etiquette, where defined guidelines have emerged and can easily be found. Blog etiquette is still evolving, and while there are certainly egregious violations (e.g., stealing somebody’s feed and posting it as your own blog entry), something like Jeremy’s use of trackbacks remains in a fuzzy grey area.

As I say, I’m not criticizing Rubel, who (like all of us) can do what he thinks is right with his blog. As for me, I wouldn’t have given the trackback a second thought.

7. Non-reporter Sends Field Report For Podcast

I was part of an intriguing new channel for delivering content, and it has me thinking about the potential for this type of process for getting the word out through non-traditional means.

You’ve probably heard something by now about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s lockout of its employees, including writers, editors, producers, and reporters. And you may have heard (since it’s been the subject of considerable discussion in the blogosphere) about how the locked-out journalists are continuing to produce content for distribution as podcasts. There’s even a site where all the various blogs and podcasts from locked-out journalists have been aggregated. The topic has been of interest to one of the listeners to the podcast Neville Hobson and I produce, “For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report.” Howard Harawitz was so interested that he took some recording equipment to the CBC offices in Hallifax, Nova Scotia, where locked-out employees were manning a picket line, and he interviewed one of them. Then, he sent the audio file of the interview to Neville and me, which we included in our discussion of the labor situation and the means by which the locked-out journalists are continuing to “broadcast.”

So let’s see what happened here. We had Howard Harawitz, who is neither a reporter nor a communicator (he works in the world of music and technology), interviewing a subject who wouldn’t be able to get his views onto the CBC airwaves but ultimately gets them spread through our podcast (in addition to the podcasts they’re producing on their own). I can see this model emerging as another form of citizen journalism, in which anybody with a microphone and recorder can conduct interviews in the field and send the files to podcasters who cover that particular area of interest. Since podcasting already appeals to niche audiences, those with a particular interest in that topic will hear interviews they won’t be able to get anyplace else. Fascinating. I was thrilled to be part of this first crack at such citizen journalism—at least, the first of which I’m aware.

8. Geeking Out On OPML

Ever since attending the Berkeley stop of Dave Winer’s OPML editor roadshow, I’ve been playing seriously with the outlining software (which you can get at http://support.opml.org/). A number of its capabilities are exciting to me, notably its collaborative capabilities. For example…

You can add the URL to somebody else’s OPML file as an outline element of your own and all of its pieces will become part of your outline
You can store an OPML file online and allow others to revise it

It’s going to take a while for the benefits of a collaborative outlining tool to spread. Hell, I’m still working to wrap my mind around it myself. But in the meantime, I decided to try my hand at it in a couple of ways. First, I’m creating the show outline for “For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report” in OPML and storing it online. Neville simple opens a copy of the software and opens the file from its URL, and he’s able to make additions and changes. That’s a lot easier than emailing attachments back and forth.

Next, I figured it would be easier to maintain my blogroll for this blog as OPML files. That way, whenever I want to add or delete a blog from the roll, I can do it in the outlining software rather than mess with my blog template. The template just points to the various files. The only problem here was getting the template to recognize that it was pulling in an OPML file. Confused about how to do that, I went to the Expression Engine support forum and asked. I was pointed to a plugin developer named Yoshi Melrose, who cranked out an OPML plugin for me (and everyone else using Expression Engine) in about 10 minutes. And it rocks…as does Yoshi.

As a result, my blogrolls are now all OPML-enabled, so not only is it easy for me to keep them updated, but I’ve been able to add a link to each OPML file so anybody can download them and use them as they wish.

Okay, so OPML may strike you as overly geeky, especially for a right-brained communicator, but I think it’s exciting.

9. Sites of the Month

PRBlogs

Robert French has caught the Constantin Basturea bug. This is a condition that prompts someone to make a contribution to the public relations professional basically out of the goodness of their heart. The condition has manifested itself in French—a professor teaching public relations at Auburn University—through his development of a blogging community focused on the PR world.

Initially, PRBlogs.org had attracted only students. Perhaps it’s the visibility several PR bloggers have given the community that has finally led to a couple of blogs from non-students, including one from Chris Thilk, author of the Movie Marketing Madness column for FilmThreat and a blog devoted to trailers, posters and other movie marketing. Another comes from Scott Kidder, a student who works for Gawker Media, which owns (among other blogs) Wonkette and Gizmodo.

PRBlogs.org has real potential to become a full-fledged community. Ultimately, however, it will take more PR people signing on to make it happen. I have no doubt there are many who work in the profession who read this and other PR blogs but have not yet taken the plunge themselves. Since French is making it free and easy to get started, I’d urge you to grab up your own blog today. The more of us out there, the better.

http://www.prblogs.org

Screencasts Online

A new website marries screencasts, blogging and vidcasts in a pretty interesting way. The site, Screencasts Online, is the brainchild of Don McAllister, who has decided to make his work available via blog and RSS feed.

In case you’re unfamiliar with a screencast, these are movies that display a computer screen while a voice narrates what’s happening on the screen. Jon Udell of InfoWorld has produced some very nifty screencasts, including one outstanding entry that explains various uses of del.icio.us.
What separates McAllister’s effort from other screencasts is the fact that it’s being produced in blog format, allowing you to subscribe via RSS to have the screencasts “delivered to your PC or Mac automatically directly into iTunes.” Very nice. McAllister’s first screencast showed how to subscribe to the screencasts using iTunes; the second “gives a quick overview on how you can use RSS to automate your web surfing and remove the tedium of manually checking websites and blogs.” McAllister notes that his screencasts will be based on Macintosh applications, but “Windows users are welcome to access the screencasts as many of the demos will be cross platform or platform independant (sic).”

http://www.screencastsonline.com

10. HC+T Update

Shel is producing a series of podcasts for The Conference Board related to its communication technology conference in New York later this week.
Shel is presenting his “Writing for the Wired World” workshop at Duke Energy in early October.
Shel is speaking at the IABC Canada conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia later in October.

11. Boilerplate And Subscription Information

You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!

Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

Posted by Shel on 09/26 at 07:02 PM
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Sunday, July 31, 2005

HC+T Update: July 2005

The July 2005 email newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology

HC+T Update
July 2005

1. Under The Wire
2. Press Releases For All
3. London PR Agency Launches An Emergency Response Blog
4. It’s Not Just The Unhappy Customers Who Blog
5. Call For A PR Blacklist Should Be A Wake-Up Call
6. Province Of Alberta Bans Keystroke Logging
7. Study Reveals Negative PR Impact Of Google Searches
8. Blog Design An Obstacle To Acceptance
9. Site of the Month
10. HC+T Update
11. Boilerplate And Subscription Information

As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog over the past month. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com.

1. Under The Wire

It’s almost midnight on the East Coast of the US and I’m sneaking this installment of HC+T Update out just under the wire…again. But it’s still July here in New York, so it’s still the July issue, even though you, no doubt, are reading it in August.

I’ve been busy! I just wrapped up the last three stops on the Ragan Communications “Writing for the Wired World” tour. I’ve had several consulting engagements. And the big news: I’ve been involved in contract negotiations for a new book. Along with my co-author, Ted Demopolous, I’ll be writing “Blogging for Business,” a how-to book that’ll be published by Dearborn Financial Press.

Anyway, I’ve got a lot of good stuff for your reading pleasure, so enough with the self-promotion and on with the content.

2. Press Releases For All

Back in April, I wrote about a discussion that had been taking place online about the idea that blogs could replace press releases. The notion has picked up steam since then, and recently Amy Gahran, who writes about a variety of communication-related issues, challenged PR people to find more creative ways to communicate than the press release. I wrote, in my blog, why some press releases remain valid.

In part of his response to my post, LA-based PR agency president Eric Schartzman wrote, “...it’s tough, in today’s 24/7 news cycle where everyone has access to the newswires online, the segregate a news releases to just the news media.”

Yeah, it’s tough. That doesn’t mean that it’s never desirable.

I encountered two instances of organizations that embraced this notion that press releases are for everybody, although they were oppositve examples. In the first, a high-tech company explained that their primary audience—sophisticated programmers and systems engineers—were far better versed in their field than the average reporter covering the company. Therefore, they wrote their news releases over the heads of the average journalist, unconcerned that they might get less coverage. Since their primary audience found releases on their site as well as other news release venues (Yahoo!, for instance), it was more important that they get news that was meaningful for them.

The other company, a telecommunications outfit, explained that their typical customer could live in a trailer park and have the IQ of a 10-year-old. In order for their news to be comprehensible to the lowest common denominator, they had to dumb down their press releases despite the fact that this rendered them far less useful to the media. (My friend Pete Shinbach wonders if an SEC violation might lurk in this line of reasoning.)

I don’t think either are good solutions. The goal of a press release is to get press. Not coverage in blogs or bars or parks or beauty salons. (If the press release does its job, people will read it in the press and then talk about it in blogs and bars and parks…) You have to love the web because, more than any other channel, it enables the kind of narrowcasting required to craft messages designed to meet the needs of different audiences. Note I didn’t say spin the messages differently. The simple fact is that different audiences have different needs and interests. Employees, for instance, have a different take on news than, say, the investment community because their context is different.

I recall the first time I produced an annual report. Having never done one before, I sat down and listed the various audiences the annual report would reach. The list reached something like 13 or 14, including individual investors, institutional investors (like fund managers), employee-shareholders, prospective employees, key customers, strategic partners, investment analysts…you get the picture. The perspectives of each audience differed, but I could produce only one version. It was a classic case of one-size-fits-all, even if it doesn’t.

So I was intriguted the first time I saw a web-based annual report with two distinct paths: one for individual investors and one for institutional investors. The only difference was jargon. Fund managers got the version laden with financial terms they inherently understood, while individual investors got a version that spelled out the meaning of each term. Brilliant.

So why not produce press releases for the press, written in news style (inverted pyramid) so they can be adapted quickly to trade publications and other vehicles, then produce a consumer version for the company website (or even delivered via a corporate blog)? The press release version would be readily accessible for anyone who wanted to read it on the media site, addressing any concerns about transparency. In fact, it increases transparency, since any discrepancies between the two (or three or four) versions would be instantly visible.

Which leaves only the issue of all those venues where the press release will appear over which the company has no control (Yahoo! jumps to mind yet again). That, ultimately, is no big deal. Press releases come with a nifty little feature called a “boilerplate,” the last paragraph that lists company particulars. How hard would it be to insert the following into the boilerplate: “This release was prepared for media use. To read a consumer version of this news, please visit our website at…”

Thus we can narrowcast, satisfying the differing needs of our diverse audiences, while increasing transparency and embracing all appropriate channels. Kinda like having one’s cake and eating it, too.

3. London PR Agency Launches An Emergency Response Blog

If you haven’t read Niall Cook’s description of the blog Hill & Knowlton’s London office created to address the terrorist situation, it’s worth your time. After determining that email was insufficient, the H&K team began using SMS (cell phone text messaging) and a blog to keep employees updated on “the situation in the city, office, and on public transport, as well as any contingency plans we need to put in place.”

“Accessible outside the firewall, but securely, it allows staff to check in whenever there is a security alert to see what the current state of play is. Because it’s a blog, it also has an RSS feed that staff can subscribe to (assuming their reader supports authentication). Finally, it’s incredibly easy for our emergency response team (including members of our excellent crisis communications group) to post updates to it.”

The blog took minutes to create, since it was just a new blog added to H&K’s existing suite of blogs. Niall’s post includes a screen shot. This is an excellent example of a PR agency practicing what it preaches.

4. It’s Not Just The Unhappy Customers Who Blog

Rob Safuto, creator of the terrific Podcast NYC, is out with a new blog. The Red Room Chronicles is dedicated to Marriott Hotels. In his initial posts, Safuto wrote,

I’ve been a Marriott Rewards member for years as I’ve been a traveling consultant for the IT and now Energy Industry since 1998. After staying in so many Marriott’s I’ve come to value inside information on the company for both business and leisure purposes. My hope is that this blog will become a fine resource for travelers everywhere who prefer Marriott Hotels.
This product-focused blog is the polar opposite of “Discover the Truth about the Land Rover Discovery 3” blog, inaugurated by a vey unhappy customer. The blog chronicles the customer’s experience and Land Rover’s response (or lack thereof) and represents a public relations nightmare for the organization. (They could certain turn the situation to their advantage by taking certain steps, but as it stands, the blog is a very public expose of the company’s lack of customer focus.)

Safuto, on the other hand, is a happy customer who prefers not to stay anywhere but Marriott. His blog represents a pure opportunity for Marriott. Whether they capitalize on that opportunity (by taking Safuto into their confidence and feeding him advance information, as they would a reporter covering the brand), “Red Room Chronicles” could become—as Safuto hopes it will—a source of information for people with an interest in Marriott.

It’s not the first blog of its kind by any stretch of the imagination. All those Macintosh-focused blogs (including the ones Apple sued) embrace exactly the same concept. But the introduction of a blog on something as non-tech as a hotel chain indicates that we’ll see more and more of this approach. It could affect everything from company PR to the role of an investment analyst.

Does it mean there’s no role for PR? As Todd Cochrane suggested on Geek News Central, does’t this just mean companies should can their PR staffs and encourage—or even pay—more Rob Safutos to blog about the company? Not on your life. In addition to the things the PR professionals do that are behind the scenes, communicators can provide support to these bloggers and use the blogs’ contents to reinforce other communication efforts.

5. Call For A PR Blacklist Should Be A Wake-Up Call

On his blog, Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo asks for an email blacklist of tech-oriented PR agencies. “I get so damned much spam (I mean “pitches”) that I’m starting to think that life would be better if I just blocked email from all the big names in Tech PR,” Zawodny complains. He doesn’t even want to omit the domains of PR agencies Yahoo works with, like Voce. Most of the comments offer advice on how to set up such a list. One journalist commented that he wouldn’t mind taking advantage of it and offers a short list as a starter.

It may seem, at first blush, that Zawodny is joining the anti-PR meme spreading through the blogosphere (e.g., Russell Beattie’s idiotic rant titled “PR People Are Morons”). Some of these assaults, though, are justified. I don’t personally know anybody who sends massive numbers of press releases and pitches via email to everybody on a generic distribution list, but I know the practice exists and is widely used. Zawodny isn’t alone in dreading the amount of email spewing forth from PR agencies. Before he left the San Jose Mercury News, Dan Gillmor let it be known that he was giving up on email altogether because of the deluge of pitches and releases swamping his in-box. If you wanted to pitch him, he said, let him subscribe to your RSS feed.

The practitioners who apply this shotgun approach to getting ink are damaging the profession. There are thousands of clued-in PR professionals who would target a journalist (or an influential blogger like Zawodny) only after doing his homework and determining that the reporter and the story are a good match. A blacklist would catch all those legitimate queries in the same filter as the “pitch spam.” Not only would the pitch never reach the target, but the journalist could miss a story in which he’s actually interested.

It’s not just Zawodny. Steve Lubetkin points to a post from Boston Heard reporter Brett Arends attacking US PR shops, and notes that PR people are circling the wagons when they should be paying close attention to Arends’ complaint:

“Nearly ever day I find myself staring at the telephone handset in disbelief after dealing with yet another example of ‘Podunk PR’

“Press offices that don’t return calls - from a daily newspaper - for four days. And are then surprised to find that the story has come and gone. Media teams that can’t confirm basic facts about their company. Media offices where everyone has left by 4:51 pm on a big news day. This sort of stuff would be a disciplinary offense in any decent public relations office in the U.K.

“But it’s amazingly common over here. And it isn’t just Boston. It’s true in New York and elsewhere.”

The response from the PR community to Arends’ complaint is to point the finger at the media, recalling all those reporters who never returned calls. But the problem is real. Arends notes, “There are many good public relations people around, people who are professional, hard-working, competent, helpful and friendly.” But these are not enough to prevent him from forming a generally negative perception of PR.

If we, as a profession, wish these online attacks would stop, then we have to do something about cleaning our own house. We have tolerated the worst practices of public relations long enough. Enough bad PR from the highly visible minority of practitioners who engage in it will result in more blacklists, more reporters who dismiss agencies and turn to alternate sources. Without any influence, why would clients hire agencies?

In the book Enterprise One-to-One, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers suggest that complaints are a company’s best feedback. By listening to complaints, companies can focus on fixing problems that make a genuine difference to customers. It’s time for the PR profession to listen to these online complaints so we can fix what is hurting our image. We can dismiss those that are just plain stupid, of course (such as the assertion that no PR is really necessary when blogs alone will do the trick). But torrents of unwanted press releases and PR offices that don’t return calls? These are things we should do something about.

While the profession cannot force individual practitioners or companies to improve their behaviors, we can take some steps:

Our professional associations, notably IABC and PRSA, can undertake awareness and education campaigns to create highlight the practices that are besmirching the profession. Both associations can try to put some teeth in their ethics policies so that they are more than documents trotted out at conferences.

PR bloggers can advocate more strongly for the best practices clients and journalists deserve. (Has anybody thought of a PR bloggers association to advocate for best practices?)

There’s more we can do, no doubt. But if PR is to survive and thrive in this transparent world in which we exist, we need to get the low-rent practitioners to clean up their act.

6. Province Of Alberta Bans Keystroke Logging

The director of the Parkland Regional Library in Lacombe, Alberta, had some doubts about the productivity of one particular employee. Being the progressive manager that she is, she decided to assess the worker’s productivity by installing keystroke logging software. This application does just what its name suggests: It records an employee’s every keystroke so it can be reviewed later by Big Br…er…the employee’s manager.

The employee found out and filed a complaint with the province’s information and privacy commissioner, who ruled that the action violated the Freedom of Information and Protection Privacy Act. The Globe and Mail has the story.

The library director is miffed by the ruling. She claims that it’s hard to measure the productivity for the kind of job this employee performed, and “We thought that using an objective check through the computer would be the most fair and objective way to do that.” Now she fears the ruling has removed an objective means of measuring performance from employers’ arsenal. If this blog were focused on Human Resources, I would rail at length about the ineptness of a manager unable to establish performance measures upfront and then assess the worker’s productivity based on an assessment of performance against those measures. But this is a communications blog, so I’ll stick to my knitting and just note that keystroke logging is another in a long list of engagement killers.

Regular readers can stop here. You’ve heard this rant before.

Engagement is a goal most executives want their employee populations to achieve. Highly engaged workforces, research shows, produce double-digit growth for their employers. Engaged employees are passionate about their work. They want to go the extra mile to meet goals. They want to pull other employees along. A variety of factors play into commitment. Trust is one of the most important. So what does it say to employees who know the company has no problem with secretly recording every key they tap on their computer keyboards? “I’ve done nothing wrong, I work hard, I produce results, but they don’t trust me.” That will build a passionate, committed, engaged workforce. Even considering only one employee who was suspected of slacking (it was never proved), other employees know it could happen to them. In fact, they have no way of knowing their keystrokes aren’t being logged right now.

So maybe the Parkland Regional Library director has lost the only tool she’s clever enough to use to assess her staff’s productivity. On the other hand, there’s now a glimmer of hope that her staff can begin to build a sense of trust. While it’s too bad that it took government action to open that possibility, I’m still applauding Alberta for its decision.

7. Study Reveals Negative PR Impact Of Google Searches

As if we need further proof that organizations no longer control their messages, Market Sentinel has released the results of a study that spotlight the negative PR implications of Google searches. The study involved Google search results for the 50 top grocery brands in the UK. Of those searches, two out of five included negative messages in the top 10 search results. The negative messages might be insults, misinformation, or organized campaigns.

According to Robin Langford, writing in NetImperative:

“Mark Rogers, CEO at Market Sentinel said that brand-owners need to pay more attention to online detractors. ‘Corporate PRs and brand owners don’t have to give this crucial ground to their critics. Online detractors can be out-thought, out-argued and out-marketed,’ Rogers said.

The white paper (PDF file) detailing the study results -— “Search is Brand” —- is available from Market Sentinel (link below). Don’t dismiss them if you don’t work in the grocery world. The results translate into just about any industry or market sector.

http://www.marketsentinel.com/files/Searchisbrand280605.pdf

8. Blog Design An Obstacle To Acceptance

One reason all the gushing about how blogs will replace press releases and even PR in general is so silly is that most people still don’t pay any attention to them. A study released Monday by New York-based Catalyst Group Design suggests the design of blogs is a major obstacle to blogs entering the mainstream. The company selected one blog—BusinessWeek’s personal finance blog “Well Spent”—because it typifies the elements and look of most blogs. Study participants—selected because they weren’t blog readers but were otherwise web-savvy—were taken to the blog and asked to react.

Most didn’t know they were looking at a blog at all and were surprised and confused when told they were. Many said they would expect a blog to indicate clearly that it’s a blog. (As I look around the PR blogs I read, few use the word “blog” prominently in their titles, subheads, or other identifiers.) The elements that help most of us identify blogs—an author’s photo, categories, archives, blogrolls, etc.—didn’t register with the test subjects. Some other findings:

Most participants couldn’t figure out how to navigate around the blog and were confused by the different sections (categories, trackbacks, etc.).
There was no clear understanding about how commenting worked. Would they appear immediately? Require approval? Result in an answer?

Every single participant agreed that RSS was confusing, and that blogs don’t help aid in the understanding of what RSS is, how it works, or why they should use it.

When starting on a lower-level page, participants were unclear about the purpose of a home page might be or what they would find there.
At the end of the session, participants said they liked the blog and would be inclined to read more, but complained that blogs don’t offer enough assistance to newcomers to help them figure out the various elements and how to use them. (Trackbacks were particularly confounding.)

The downloadable PDF version of the 19-page report includes a useful summary of findings that could serve as a roadmap for improving blog interfaces. In the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt for existing blogs to incorporate some basic how-to’s or FAQs for people visiting the blog. I’m already making some notes about some simple additions and enhancements to this blog to simplify the experience for visitors who have not knowingly seen a blog before.

If the report mirrors general perceptions of blogs, though, it’ll be a while—at least through the next phase of blog design’s evolution—before they are mainstream enough to fulfill the expectations so many starry-eyed bloggers believe they are ready to fulfill right now.

9. Site of the Month

Intelliseek has been in the search game for some time, before Google was a gleam in its founders’ eyes. The venerable search organization has just released Blogpulse, a blog search engine with several twists. More than just a way to find blogs, Blogpulse has several features that rank and compare blogs. It’s Profile is particularly compelling, showing just how connected any given blogger is. Be sure to try out all the features on Blogpulse; they’re free.

Blogpulse: http://www.blogpulse.com

10. HC+T Update

In August, I’ll present two full-day workshops at Intel’s headquarters, one on writing for the web and the other on engagement
Melcrum Communications is about to issue a white paper I wrote on new communication technologies, running the gamut from blogs and wikis to Skype
I’ve agreed to speak at Podcast Hotel, a podcasting conference from Corante that’ll be held in Portland, Oregon in September

11. Boilerplate And Subscription Information

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Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

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Posted by Shel on 07/31 at 05:12 PM
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Thursday, June 30, 2005

HC+T Update: June 2005

The June 2005 e-mail newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology

HC+T Update
June 2005

1. Under The Wire Again!
2. Cluelessness In The World Of Big PR
3. The Unique Characteristics Of Podcasts
4. Another Call To Replace PR With Blogging
5. Deconstructing Larkin
6. Top 10 Marketing Trends
7. Don’t Miss “Writing For The Wired World”
8. Site of the Month
9. HC+T Update
10. Boilerplate And Subscription Information

1. Under The Wire Again!

With just about six hours left in June, I’m delighted to get the June issue of HC+T Update out the door.

It’s been a heck of a month. I’ve been on the road almost the entire month; I think I’ve spent five days at home. I just wrapped up my travels this morning, returning from Washington, D.C. and IABC’s international conference. (More on this later in Update.)

You’ll be reading this in July, no doubt, but distributing it any time up to midnight tonight qualifies it as the June issue…right? I could even distribute it at 12:55 a.m., since it would still be June in Hawaii. (Hey, I’m looking for an excuse here!)

In any case, I hope you enjoy it.

2. Cluelessness In The World Of Big PR

PR heavyweight Ketchum has come under considerable fire for the launch of its new-media practice. If you haven’t read Constantin Basturea’s excellent deconstruction of the Ketchum approach, you can find it here:

http://blog.basturea.com/archives/2005/06/18/poor-ketchum/

Here’s a summary of Constantin’s points, many of which had already been articulated in one place or another:

Ketchum failed to launch the eKetchum blog it promised.
Ketchum has no executives blogging, along the lines of a Richard Edelman Christopher Hanegan
The press release didn’t include the URL where people could learn more about the new service
Ketchum’s podcast isn’t a podcast because you can’t subscribe via RSS

There’s more. A lot more. Read Constantin’s post.

eKetchum director Adam Brown posted a response to Constantin’s blog, by the way, that addressed one or two of these issues, and not very well.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about an additional bit of cluelessness from Ketchum, the company that’s supposed to help its clients with social media like blogs. Ketchum has a website that addresses some new media issues, called Ketchum Ideas. The site offers an idea a day. I haven’t read them all; so far, in fact, just the one our friend James Cherkoff of Open Sauce Marketing forwarded along, in which he is quoted. It deals with the need to factor blogs into crisis communication planning (old news) and offers some advice. It’s not all good advice.

One of the things Ketchum says you need “at a minimum” is…

“A customized blog that is ready to go should you need it - either a ‘live’ site already in use or a ‘dark’ site that can be switched on almost immediately. But be sure to assess the potential vulnerabilities of entering this volatile sphere of the Internet.”

A dark site for addressing a crisis is a good idea. A “dark blog” is not. Blogs are, at their core, trust networks. One of the upsides of a corporate blog (if done well) is that it builds a bond of trust with readers. When a crisis strikes, you can tap into that trust network where you have some goodwill in the bank. (Look back at my coverage of BigHa’s blog and how it helped the company through its media crisis…or For Immediate Release’s interview with BigHa’s Noah Acres.) Starting a blog specifically to address a crisis, though, could only be met with derision. How do you build trust through honest and candid engagement when you’re busily defending the company from the aftershocks of a crisis?

If this is the kind of advice Ketchum plans to offer clients of its new service, prospective clients should beware. It’s just further indication that the company is jumping into the blogosphere for no other reason than that they don’t want to leave billables on the table. It certainly doesn’t seem to have much to do with an understanding of the environment in which they plan to help clients communicate.

3. The Unique Characteristics Of Podcasts

As Virgin Atlantic begins a podcast series dealing with travel, it’s clear that businesses are adopting podcasting as a channel for reaching targeted audiences with fresh, unique content. Coupled with the release last week of Apple’s iTunes version 4.9—complete with podcasting support—it’s clear that communicators need to come up to speed on this medium.

A recent ITWorld.com article listed five reasons businesses should consider podcasting. One of them was that podcasts encourage two-way communication with listeners. Specifically, according to the author James Lewin: “Because podcasts are built on RSS 2.0, the lingua franca of the blog world, podcast content is easy to subscribe to and blog about. This encourages other publishers to add their meta-comments about a podcast.

“Because podcast feeds are often built with blog-tools, they frequently support comments and track back, which encourage a two-way dialog about the content. This two-way conversation is important, because it creates 3rd party content about your podcast, and encourages links to your content.”

I’m inclined to agree with Lewin’s observations, particularly in light of my own experience with “For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report.” So I was intrigued when Rebecca Leib, executive editor of ClickZ Network, wrote in an article titled WhyPod? that podcasts are flatly one-way:

“Podcasts offer zero interactivity. Once downloaded, a podcast is an audio file—plain and simple. Nothing more, nothing less. The subscriber can listen. She can’t click, fill out a form, or navigate elsewhere.”

Right. And, of course, you can’t click, fill out a form, or navigate anywhere when you’re in your car or walking your dog, but you can listen to a podcast. And because the podcast presumably is narrowcasted to your interests, when you’re back at your computer, you post something about it on your blog and include a trackback, post a comment to the podcast blog, send an audio file, call the comment line, or email the podcaster.

With my podcasting partner, Neville Hobson, I often spend half of our show talking about issues raised by our listeners. It’s not a real-time conversation by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s definitely a conversation. While the podcast itself may well be nothing more than an MP3 file, in the context of the social network of which it’s a part, it is definitely an interactive tool.

Leib also suggests that marketing podcasts need to be more professional than the amateurish podcasts produced by individuals. “A low-rent approach doesn’t work for every brand.” I see a difference, though, between “a low-rent approach” and an authentic human voice that doesn’t sound like a professional broadcaster. GM cars are a pretty significant brand, but Deb Ochs sounds like a regular person when she conducts the Fastlane podcast interviews.

Leib makes a few other questionable statements. Quite correctly, the notes that podcasts are RSS-distributed feeds to which listeners subscribe. But she goes further: “Real podcasts don’t stream, nor are they individually downloadable, single files.” Really? “For Immediate Release” is a real podcast. It’s available by subscription through our RSS feed, and we hope more and more of our listeners will access it that way. But our statistics indicate most of our listeners download the MP3 file. Heck, even Adam Curry’s “Daily Source Code”—the original podcast—is available for download. And recently, we’ve added a Flash-driven streaming player that lets anyone listen to our podcast directly from our site. Leib seems to want to have it both ways. It’s either a plain old MP3 file (which allows you to do with it whatever you will) or it’s not. To qualify as a podcast, you have to be able to subscribe to the feed, but there’s no rule that says you must limit your podcast to an RSS subscription.

Another point Leib makes:

“If your podcast is high in informational value but lacks other audio bells and whistles, such as music, interviews, celebrity value, or sound effects (particularly if the audience is business-to-business), you may be better off with text.”

Again, I don’t think so. It’s easy to dismiss the value of the sense of sound, but there’s just something about hearing a real person rather than reading their words. And, again, if I’m in my car, I can’t read anyway. (Well, I suppose I could, but seeing other people read while they drive has always terrified me!) “For Immediate Release” isn’t the only podcast that is largely just a couple guys talking. One of the most popular podcast out there is Dave Winer’s “Morning Coffee Notes,” which features Winer talking, coughing, sniffling, and making a host of other sounds. Even if your podcast is business- or marketing-focused, all you need is an interesting person with something to say to make it worthwhile. (Which is not to dismiss sound effects, music, and interviews, of course.)

Despite all this, Leib’s overarching point is a valid one: Don’t podcast just because you can. Make sure you have a strategy that supports it.

4. Another Call To Replace PR With Blogging

So Steve Rubel gets up at Gnomedex and says something along the lines of, “Blogging is PR with candor.” I wasn’t there, but I’ve read the reports of people who were.

Blogging certainly can be candid, although there’s nothing to stop a blogger from being less than candid in his blog. Further, I’ve seen plenty of candid PR that was produced without blogs. The notion that PR simply cannot be candid without blogs is absurd. I don’t think that’s what Steve meant at all. (I doubt that Steve is lobbying for his employer, Cooper Katz, to eliminate all of its efforts and provide no services other than blogging to its clients.) But some apparently took it that way.

Like Todd Cochrane, who wrote in Geek News Central, “companies probably would be better in firing most of their PR people, and hiring bloggers as Marqui did in their paid to blog program.”

Now, let me state straight up that I’m a Todd Cochrane fan. I listen to the Geek News Central podcast religiously, and the blog is among the feeds that are in my A-list folders. But a statement like this displays an appalling ignorance of what PR people do day in and day out. Did Todd read Scott Cutlip’s or Fraser Seitel’s PR textbook before suggesting that companies can replace public relations professionals with blogs? It’s not just Todd, of course. Most critics of PR know little of the profession.

(This isn’t the place, by the way, to address the ethics of Marqui’s paid-to-blog program.)

Public relations is, as I’ve defined it before, the practice of managing an organization’s relationships with various constituent audiences, notably those whose opinions and behaviors affect the organization’s ability to execute its strategic plan. It’s also about influence, and not in a negative, manipulative way. For example, I have colleagues who work for a major global PR firm on an account for a government agency designed to influence young teens to commit to remaining drug-free. (Now there’s a nefarious goal if ever there was one.) The research they did was extensive, leading to strategies that would be effective with the target audience. Their implementation has been evolutionary and crafted with the peak of professionalism. Their metrics are sophisticated and help them assess the degrees of success and adjust their efforts to produce even better results.

If we listen to Todd, all this could be replaced with a blog or two.

Todd and the legions of others who proclaim blogging the future of organizational communications are blissfully unaware of the tens of thousands of highly professional public relations practitioners who work in relative obscurity producing outstanding results for their organizations through the ethical implementation of tactics based on strategies designed to deliver specific outcomes. And, believe it or not, many of those tactics are based on a foundation of openness, transparency, and candor.

The notion also suggests that the channel through which a message is delivered is more important than the message itself. Who can we rely on to crystallize an organization’s message? Speaking at the opening general session of the IABC international conference on June 26, political operative James Carville defended the sound bite, noting that it provides clarity around complex issues. Can we rely on a network of bloggers to do that? Or should bloggers react to the messages trained, experienced professionals have crafted?

I understand the nature of evangelism and you’ll find no bigger supporter of blogs as a PR tool than me. But I get weary of hearing proclamations that blogs spell the end of public relations. I wish those making such assertions would make at least a token effort to learn something about the profession they’re so easily dismissing before calling for its eradication.

But this has always been true: When you’re selling hammers, every problem looks like a nail.

5. Deconstructing Larkin

(Get ready. This is a long piece.)

T.J. Larkin is an excellent presenter. He’s entertaining, engaging, witty, and charming. At the end of his presentation at the IABC Research Foundation luncheon at the IABC international conference in Washington,D.C., on Tuesday, June 28, the crowd of about 500 gave him a standing ovation. His performance deserved it. The substance of his presentation? Well, that’s another thing altogether.

I first became aware of Larkin when I read “Communicating Change.” In this book, Larkin points to research conducted in the late 1980s by Towers Perrin in which employees were asked their preferred source of information. The answer, it should come as no surprise to anyone, was: “My immediate supervisor.” Of course, the question was asked badly, and it was the wrong question. The research was so flawed as to render it useless. The question needs to be asked multiple times about a number of business issues and topics. If asked, “What is your preferred source of information about benefits?” would employees point to their supervisors? How about this one: “What is your preferred source of information about the impact of new federal regulations on this company’s ability to compete and sustain profitability?”

So you need to ask the question about each of the major issues facing the organization. In addition, the question should also ask for the top three preferred sources in order to produce a ranking. What if the intranet falls right below the supervisor by a difference of a neglible few percentage points? Should the intranet be dismissed as a source of information?

Larkin concluded in his book that it should. He blatantly stated that any communication to front-line employees that does not come through immediate supervisors is a waste of time and resources. I was on a plane when I read the book, and my seat mate must have concluded that I suffered from Tourette’s Syndrome. Every few minutes, I’d jerk into an upright position and shout out, “Bullshit!” or “Crap!”

Today’s presentation left me feeling pretty much the same. As is the case in most of the other advice he presents, Larkin made huge leaps from questionable research to astounding conclusions. Here’s a summary of some key issues I had with his remarks and his conclusions:

Web, paper, and face-to-face

Larkin began with a brief summary of the most effective uses of the web, print, and face-to-face communication. The web, he said, is best for immediacy (the delivery of news content) and the retrieval of data and information. He made no reference to the web’s multimedia capabilities or the collaborative nature of message boards, blogs, wikis, or other social media tools. Print is best for learning long, complicated, new ideas. Face-to-face is best for motivating change.

To prove his point, Larkin referenced a study in which employees were given a benefits document on the web that contained a lot of links. Another group was given the same document in print. When asked to explain a particular benefit, the group that got the information online made 33% more errors than the group that got it in print.

Why is this problematic? Larkin made no reference whatsoever to the quality of the web document. Were the links embedded in the text or in a “related links” box? Were the links clear in terms of what readers would find when they clicked them? Were they relevant to the content on the page? Were they organized in a manner to support e-learning? Or was it a print document shoveled onto the screen and littered with links? In other words, did the web document adhere to the principles of usability? We’ll never know; Larkin didn’t say.

My conclusions: Bad websites are bad. Bad hyperlinks are bad. But Larkin doesn’t suggest that one solution to this problem might be to improve the site so it produces better results. His answer is simply not to use the web for this purpose at all, but rather deliver print.

Continuing with the benefits theme Larkin started, let’s assume an employee wants to learn all the benefits associated with having a baby. She could read through every element of every plan in the linear print document, or visit the “Life Events” page on the benefits site and click on “Having a Baby,” where all the information relevant to the expectant mother is aggregated. Which is more likely to produce better results?

At one point, Larkin reinforced his points by pointing to a company whose web sites his firm “improved.” However, I wasn’t aware of Larkin’s qualifications as an online communicator. Just how did he “improve” them? In ways that, say, I would endorse? Good question; he didn’t offer up an explanation of just how those pages were made better.

Searching isn’t thinking

Larkin also produced the results of research to support his argument that there is a vast difference between searching out content on the web and learning. The study cited was from Australia, conducted by Wendy Sutherland Smith. In the study, Smith had grade-school students go to a list of links to information about penguins, then go to a shelf with books about penguins. On the web, they clicked madly and didn’t learn much. When they went to the shelf, they picked one or perhaps two books and sat quietly reading.

But again, were the links crafted in a manner to support learning? Are all those e-learning organizations simply pulling the wool over clients’ eyes? Or have they, through research and experience, figured out how to appropriately craft online content to support learning habits? Any psychologist will tell you we learn best by playing. What about online games-based learning? It wasn’t an avenue of this issue that Larkin ever addressed. He simply leapt from the results of this and a few other research studies to conclude that learning is always best in print.

Face-to-face and change

Finally, Larkin suggested that change is best managed face-to-face. You’ll find no bigger advocate for face-to-face communication than me, and I agree that face-to-face engagement with an immediate supervisor will drive change effectively, especially when the supervisor has embraced the change him or herself. But you can’t tell me that Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” did not drive any change. The power of the printed word to inspire people to action is unquestioned -— except, perhaps, by T.J. Larkin.

It was in this area that the research Larkin presented and his conclusions confounded me the most. For example, he presented a study in which the motivating factors driving behavioral change in employees were calculated. Change driven from articles in an employee newspaper came in at .08, while change driven by an explanation from a supervisor weighted in at .72 (where 1 is the highest). Change driven by attendance at a town hall meeting came in at .19 while a manager explaining the change came in at .72. Merger communications from the top produced behavioral change of .00, while informal communication from supervisors came in at .53.

Larkin admitted that the combination of messages from senior leaders and interpretations from supervisors produced better results, but said these results were incidental. But again, there was no reference to the quality of the higher-level communication or the strategy under which it was executed.

My conclusion: Bad communication is bad. Should we help leaders improve their communication? Not according to Larkin. According to Larkin, there is no value to high-level communication. Employees don’t care, he said. CEO-focused articles in employee newsletters were one example of the formal, top-down communication that failed to produce significant results. Did those communications include the CEO recognizing and rewarding employees who embraced the desired behaviors? We have no clue. We only know they were newsletter articles.

CEO communication

To support his view of the worthlessness of leader communication, Larkin pointed to research from three companies -— GE, Lloyd’s, and Heinz -— that showed managers would spend no more than 3 minutes with printed CEO communication. He also showed a photo of Domino’s Pizza drivers watching a video of the CEO presented earnings results. In the photo, the employees looked dumbfounded and uninterested. That’s proof, in Larkin’s world, that communicators should abandon CEO communications and focus on supervisor communication.

Communicators who adopted this approach would abandon all business literacy efforts to connect employees to the marketplace. Understanding business strategy is pointless —- only the workplace implications matter. You have to wonder what Jack Stack at Springfield Remanufacturing would make of such an argument. (Stack introduced open-book management and engaged in lots of CEO communication with his troops, ensuring they understood the big picture and had line of sight between their jobs and the bottom line.) Using Larkin’s line of thinking, soldiers would pay attention only to their platoon leaders and sergeants, and dismiss General Patton or Eisenhower as delivering just a bunch of (in Larkin’s word) shit. (During a visit to the U.S. Archives after the conference, I saw General Eisenhower’s message to the troops before D-Day. I thought it was inspiring, and history affirms that the troops had the same reaction.)

In my world, employees want to be led by leaders who lead. They want to trust their leaders and know they are guiding the organization forward and not to its doom (and their own unemployment). And there are plenty of examples of leaders who communicate effectively to drive organizational change and influence employee behavior. As my friend Angela Sinckas noted, Chrysler’s turnaround was not the result of supervisor communication, but rather Lee Iacoca’s dynamic leadership communication. Need a current example? Intel CEO Paul Otellini is blogging over the intranet, sharing issues and concerns with employees and soliciting comments that inform his decisions. Employees feel listened to and engaged. Otellini makes better decisions. Trust grows. Intel wins.

And isn’t it interesting that in recent research, IBM employees preferred to get their information from the intranet more than from supervisors and colleagues combined?

The GE/Lloyd’s/Heinz research -— yet again -— made no reference to the quality or nature of the communication that failed…only that it failed.

Larkin said he has never seen research that supports the value of CEO communication. One wonders how hard he has looked, since the value of leader communication has been documented repeatedly.

My take: Bad leader communication is bad. But we shouldn’t abandon the leader as a force for communication. We should improve the communication from the leader to produce better results.

Well, he’s entertaining

So, there were 500 communicators on their feet, applauding Larkin after having laughed at his contempt for the examples of bad communication he had presented. It is my sincere hope they were applauding his performance. (Hell, I applauded his performance.) My fear, though, is that communicators struggling with leader communications and mediocre intranets will return to their offices and advocate the abandonment of valuable communication channels and sources based on Larkin’s conclusions.

The conclusions are leaps of logic. The research is questionable. And I hope those attending take it with the bucket of salt they deserve.

5. Top 10 Marketing Trends

Every now and then, I drop by Web Digest for Marketers to see what’s on Larry Chase’s mind. I’ve never worked in marketing or marcom, but it’s hard to deny that—at least in terms of the channels we use -— marketing and PR are joined at the hip.

On my last visit, I found Chase has posted his “Top 10 Trends for the Next 10 Years..” Personally, I’m reluctant to prognosticate two years out. For example, who would have predicted 18 months ago that podcasting would be a major trend? It didn’t even exist before last August. (Take a look at Neville’s post today to see exactly what’s expected of podcasting as it continues to build momentum.)

Still, Chase’s list is intriguing because of the items that synch nicely with the themes raised by the PR blogging community in the last year or so. For example (what follows are directly quoted from Chase’s list):

2. Feed Marketing Flourishes: You’ve got RSS (Real Simple Syndication). You’ve got Podcasting (where you can download and time-shift audio content to your iPod or MP3 player). Now you’ve even got Video Podcasting where you can download MP4 videos into Sony’s PlayStation Portable unit for viewing when you’re mobile. As the use of RSS grows quickly, and more consumers buy iPods or MP3 players, these formats will grow in usage. And where there are ears and especially eyeballs, marketers are never too far behind.

5. Reverb Marketing, In Stereo: eMarketer points out that many Internet users already use multiple forms of media at once. Even as I write this I’m listening to CNBC in the background. Smart marketers will synchronize their messaging so the end user hears and sees complementary messages at or near the same time.

6. Blogs Go Multimedia: Blogs are obviously here to stay. Some of the cutting-edge blogs are starting to offer content in audio and even in video. This will not only affect journalism, but it will impact the retail business as well.

9. Publishing Faces Tectonic Shifts: Research is already showing that many people in their 20s are not picking up the newspaper habit the way their parents did. Add to this demographic shift the cost of newsprint, postage (for magazines) and handling, and it’s likely to cause tectonic shifts in the publishing industry. Many people already read newspapers and magazines online. My bet is that special issues will appear in print, and that many publishers will ultimately have to figure out how to make a go of it with free content online (i.e., advertiser-supported), perhaps by asking their readers for demographic information that enables the publisher to sell targeted advertisements at a premium, as you’ll frequently find with trade publications.

Whether these trends will hold up over 10 years remains to be seen. More likely, new trends will emerge that we can’t even begin to imagine today. The full list is worth reading, though. While the trends may not last a decade, they’re certainly true today.

7. Tech Media This Week

Sam Whitmore, the fellow behind Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey, has launched a new podcast you should listen to: Tech Media This Week. It’s short, intelligent, and deals with issues of interest to most of us in the PR world. There’s a story, for example, about the impending sale of Fast Company magazine and an analysis from a PR perspective BusinessWeek’s June 20 cover story, “The Power of Us.” Coordinates for the podcast (directly from Sam’s announcement):

If you want to listen using your computer’s MP3 player, click this link:
http://slapcast.com/users/SWMS

If you want to download it to your iPod or other portable MP3 player, paste this URL into your iPodder or other podcatcher software:
http://slapcast.com/rss/SWMS/index.xml

TMTW also is available as a download from the SWMS site.
http://www.mediasurvey.com

8. Three “Writing For The Wired World” Workshops Remain

There are three workshops left in the current offering of my two-day session, “Writing for the Wired World” from Ragan Communications.

Here’s the schedule:

Washington DC, July 11-12
Atlanta, July 21-22
San Francisco, July 25-26

Get details at http://www.ragan.com/wired2005

And remember, I also bring this workshop in-house if you have enough communicators in your organization who can benefit from it. Details are on my Web site. Book a one-day in-house workshop between now and the end of April and you’ll get $1,000 off the workshop fee.

9. Sites of the Month

I got an e-mail from Alexandra Samuel, who let me know she had been engaged in introducing RSS to a lot of PR types. (Are we a “type?”) I understand the challenge. I just finished a two-day “Writing for the Wired World” workshop that included an introduction to RSS, and it took a lot longer than I expected as these communicators tried to wrap their minds around the concept.

Alexandra said she realized she needed “a simple, engaging introduction to RSS.” So she wrote one. And I like it. If you’re maintaining any kind of list of sites or posts that take a stab at explaining RSS to the uninitiated, you could do worse than adding Alexandra’s post -— “10 Steps to RSStocracy” —- to the mix.

http://www.rsstocracy.com

One of the missing pieces in podcasting is the ability to search from among the many audio files out there for the podcast (or, for that matter, video blog or file) for the one that covers material in which you have an interest. Blinkx has introduced a service that seems pretty effective at closing that gap. Blinkx.tv applies a “contextual engine” to listen to online multimedia files and make them searchable. At launch, the site had catalogued more than 20,000 podcasts, and the results are interesting, to say the least.

http://www.blinkx.tv

10. HC+T Update

Shel will meet with communicators from a well-known non-profit group on the development of a strategic online communication function.
Shel will consult with a major financial services organization to conduct a review of its online communication efforts
Shel will conduct a teleseminar for IABC on business podcasting. The teleseminar is set for July 28. Details are on the IABC website at http://www.iabc.com.

11. Boilerplate And Subscription Information

You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!

HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe, unsubscribe and view back issues.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader.

Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

Posted by Shel on 06/30 at 04:13 PM
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Tuesday, May 31, 2005

HC+T Update: May 2005

The May 2005 e-mail newsletter from Holtz Communication + Technology

HC+T Update
May 2005

1. Under The Wire
2. Spam, Blacklists, And The Social Web
3. RSS: The Full-Feed Versus Excerpt Debate
4. PR And Trademarks: Balancing Business Interests
5. Campaign To Promote Print Focuses On Print
6. Posts Count, Not The Number Of Blogs
7. Don’t Miss “Writing For The Wired World”
8. Site of the Month
9. HC+T Update
10. Boilerplate And Subscription Information

As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog over the past month. You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com.

1. Under The Wire

Whew! Talk about getting in under the wire! It’s about 11 p.m. on May 31. I’m sitting in a hotel in Washington, D.C., getting my May issue out with just about an hour left in May. At least I’m getting it out in May, even if you do get it in June!

To say it has been a busy month is the height of understatement…and June is going to be worse! I’ll actually be home for only seven days during June.

But it’s a monthly newsletter and I’ll get it out monthly, even if it IS at the very last possible moment. I hope you enjoy it. As usual, much of the content is repurposed from my blog. Be sure to read the very next item. With luck, it’ll inspire you to subscribe to my RSS feed and scrap email delivery.

2. Spam, Blacklists, And The Social Web

Spam and spammers suck. I want to make it abundantly clear that I despise spam and the cretinous subhuman vermin-like criminals who send it. Was that strong enough? I just want to leave doubt where I stand before I get to the point. Spam is killing email. People who used to trust their email now fear that their email won’t get through, getting caught instead in a spam filter. They wonder if they’re getting all the email they should; some email destined for them may have been caught in spam filters. And a visit to the email inbox has become an experience to dread as you have to cull through message after message, determining which is spam and which is legitimate, then acting on the spam. Some of us even spend time going through the spam that our filters have caught in order to identify any false positives.

That said, there are some issues with the services that identify domains sending spam you should know about if your company hosts a web site and, notably, if you or your organization has a blog or a podcast.

Neville Hobson, my podcasting co-host, got an email from Steve O’Keefe over at the International Association of Online Communicators. Steve was trying to send his member email newsletter, but the mail server was rejecting it. As he dug into the problem, he found that the server wouldn’t send the email because it contained the domain: http://www.forimmediaterelease.biz. That’s the domain for our podcast. It turns out the server was using a database of domains suspected of sending spam and rejecting any email that contained any of those domains anywhere in the text of their messages.

I sent an email to Jeff Chan who runs the SURBL service—one of many—that maintains such a database. This is not a company, an agency, or a spinoff of any formal entity (such as the World Wide Web Consortium or ICANN). It’s some people who are (justifiably) fed up with spam who have decided to do something about it. It turns out there are a lot of these RBLs around (an acronym for Real-Time Blackhole List). Internet Service Providers use these databases however they want to in order to try to keep these domains from being spread around the Net.

A few email exchanges with Jeff got our podcast blog removed from his blacklist and added to a whitelist. Then Neville found his personal domain, nevon.net, was also blacklisted; he had to go through the same rigamarole.

The process of getting un-blacklisted (de-blacklisted?) was relatively easy. Even over the Memorial Day weekend, Jeff Chan was responsive and understanding. One thing that concerns me, though, is that he noted other blacklist maintainers wouldn’t bother to respond at all. There is no set of guidelines among these RBLs that governs their behavior.

Another concern came from a comment in one of Jeff’s emails. He said, “I’d feel better if you had an email policy on your site.”

I’m no newcomer to the Net and its issues. An email policy is certainly necessary for any commercial web site. But a blog? We have never, not once, sent an email from the forimmediaterelease.biz domain. We never will. We accept email at the domain so our listeners can send us comments, but if we reply, we use our personal email accounts. Now, Technorati is tracking more than 10 million blogs. For any of those that set their own domain names (rather than using the typepad.com or blogspot.com domain), even though they don’t use email—in fact, they are all RSS adherents—their domain is at risk for blacklisting. And if somebody (like Steve O’Keefe in our case) doesn’t tell you that your domain has been blacklisted, you may never know.

I posted an item about this experience to my blog and was immediately attacked as a clueless dweeb who clearly didn’t understand the depth of the spam problem. The comments fell into a few broad categories:

Spam is bad. We’re doing good. If a few innocent domains get caught up in the process, that’s just the price of vigilance.
You should have directed your anger at the spammers who created the necessity for this process, not the people who are trying to do something about it. (I didn’t think I was angry, but you can read my post and tell me if I’m wrong.)
This wasn’t the RBL’s fault, but the fault of the ISP that misused the database.
We’d love to notify people whose domains we’ve blacklisted, but hey, we’re just volunteers and we don’t have time and the technology doesn’t make it easy.
The Net shouldn’t evolve to accommodate ev eryone. Everyone who uses the Net should learn the technology as well as the rest of us have.

All of which misses the point. I have no problem with these folks—as disorganized and vigilante-like as they are—doing their best to protect the rest of us from spam. But the web is opening up to more and more people who are not steeped in technology. Starting a blog requires nothing more than a visit to a blog-hosting web site and the completion of a form. Maintaining the blog itself is just as easy. So now we have millions of ordinary people using the web in its most utilitarian form who may be blacklisted and never know it, know how to find out whether they are or not, or determine how to deal with it.

My post was meant to point out that the RBLs haven’t yet caught up to the world of blogging in terms of their expectations and policies (e.g., an email policy on the site), and to point out to those who maintain sites that they need to be aware that they could wind up on a blacklist, and that some of the blacklisters don’t care if you’re innocent. Be warned.

If you want to read the entire comment thread—and it is fascinating—it’s here:

http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/weblog/comments/blacklisting_blogs/

And if you want to find out if your domain is blacklisted by any of these services, use the form on this page:

http://www.rulesemporium.com/cgi-bin/uribl.cgi

3. RSS: The Full-Feed Versus Excerpt Debate

The alternative to email mailing lists, as you know if you’ve read this newsletter for any length of time, is RSS. Really Simple Syndication lets visitors to your site subscribe to your “feed” and receive updates on their news readers. The updates arrive when your feed—just a text file—is updated, not when you get around to sending the email. Best known for blogs and podcasts, RSS works perfectly well for ordinary web site content. I offer a feed from my business web site home page, for example. If you subscribe to my feed, you’ll find out whenever I change something on my home page.

As RSS gains momentum, more and more people are reading web pages in their news readers without ever visiting the originating site. This disturbs some people, but it’s a reality we need to deal with: News readers could well disintermediate much of the World Wide Web.

In a recent Communication World article, internal communications thought leader Roger D’Aprix complained that the world of online communication has created a flood of information, but that nobody has helped people sift through all that new data. I suspect Roger isn’t aware of RSS news readers, since that’s exactly what they do. I’m able to read 500 blogs and sites each morning in about 45 minutes because I do it all within my news reader. I could never visit all those sites and pages individually. As I find feeds are less worthwhile to me than I had originally thought, it’s easy to remove the feed. It’s equally easy to add new feeds as I find them.

There are two ways to handle RSS feeds. One is to include the entire article or post in the feed. The other is to offer only an excerpt. The idea behind the excerpt is to tease you with the information so that you’ll want to visit the actual site in order to read the entire piece. Visiting the site is important to those who have advertising on their pages, who monitor visits to the site, and who rely on their sites to drive commerce or convey branding.

The reality, though, is that I find myself removing feeds with partial items. For me—and for many others, based on what I’ve been reading—the benefit of the reader is the fact that it keeps you from having to visit the site. I don’t have the time to visit each page. And, as readers become more common, larger segments of the audience will resent being dragged to a site because the author didn’t include the entire item in the feed.

That’s the idea behind disintermediation. You used to have to visit a web page in order to take advantage of the content, but now a new technology makes it easier to keep up with all those pages without having to visit each one. Web sites become unnecessary. Content producers need to figure out how to get their messages across without the benefit of slick web design.

Of course, web pages aren’t going anywhere. You still need to visit sites to conduct research, buy stuff, find answers. RSS feeds are just for the delivery of content, not unlike an email newsletter. But if you offer feeds, take my advice. If you want readers who deliberately subscribed to your feed to read it and keep subscribing, deliver full text.

4. PR And Trademarks: Balancing Business Interests

I used to work for Mattel. From 1984 to 1988 I was a communicator at the company’s headquarters, then located in Hawthorne, California. I started out managing employee communications and was director of corporate communications by the time Mattel and I parted ways. During my time at Mattel, I came to understand that the company’s defense of its trademarks had assumed kneejerk proportions. Any perceived violation of the trademark prompted swift legal action with no consideration for the consequences. Nobody at Mattel ever dreamed that the fallout from such action might actually be worse than the damage caused by the violation. “If we let this violation go unchallenged, it’ll be harder to challenge the next one,” was the thinking.

I’ve just read about a suit Mattel has filed against against a Canadian restaurant called Barbie’s. The restaurant name has nothing to do with the plastic icon. Rather it’s a reference to the Australian slang for barbecue (as in, “Throw another shrimp on the barbie”). Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary of English includes only one definition for the word “barbie,” and it’s the reference to the Australian slang. Regardless of the fact that the Webster’s listing legitimizes the use of the word, Mattel believes the name could cause confusion in the marketplace (Mattel: “Our customers are idiots”), so the company is taking the Quebec restaruanteur to the Canadian Supreme Court, which agreed yesterday to hear the case.

When I worked at Mattel, I was also heavily involved with the Los Angeles chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC). Another IABC member, who worked walking distance from Mattel’s offices at TRW Space and Electronics, was a dynamo communicator named (can you feel it coming) Barbie Falconer. She eventually left communications and opening a clothing boutique. I’m not sure what it was called, but I suspect Mattel would have taken her to court if she had called it Barbie’s Boutique, even though it’s her name. Mattel owns the trademark, but it’s worth remembering that the Barbie doll was named after the daughter of Mattel co-founder Ruth and Elliott Handler. They also own the trademark for the Ken doll, named after the Handler’s son. Are they suing every non-Mattel use of the name Ken? Ken’s Auto Body? Ken’s All-Nite Diner? Ken’s Bail Bonds?

Nah, just Barbie, because Ken’s not the icon Barbie is. But I wonder if Mattel has ever measured the fallout of such legal action. There was the Aqua song lyric, “I’m a Barbie girl in a Barbie world,” which led Mattel to sue. I thought that was a bad idea, as were several other suits Mattel filed, including one against a photographer who used the doll for some, um, impressionistic photos posted to the web. And I think the suit against the Quebec restaurant is a bad idea.

The obvious backlash is over the perceived company with deep pockets going after the small business without the resources to defend itself. But I think there are worse ramifications than being seen as a bully. When I worked at Mattel—admittedly, a long time ago—the company employed different public relations agencies for different product lines. The agency that handled the Hot Wheels account, for example, specialized in events. At the time, the company was conducting Hot Wheels races at shopping malls. Barbie was represented by Rogers and Cowans. This is noteworthy because Rogers and Cowans’ specialty is personalities. That’s right; Barbie was not a toy, but a personality. And if she is being deliberately promoted as a personality, then she’s fair game for such references as those that appeared in the Aqua song lyrics. It shouldn’t take a smart attorney long to figure out that this revelation could be part of a legal defense.

The worst possible case, though, would be for a court to determine that “barbie” does have meaning outside the trademark and, in fact, has become so commonly applied that it has transcended the trademark and has entered the realm of common usage (like band-aid, kleenex, and xerox). This would be like a death sentence for a brand already under pressure from the success of the competing Bratz doll line. And Mattel could avoid it if it would just stop jerking its knee and be more discretionary when picking its trademark fights.

Tonight, in sympathy for the poor beseiged restuarnteur in Quebec, I think I’ll barbecue dinner. No shrimp, I’ll probably throw some steaks on the barbie. Got that, Mattel? I’m going to throw some steaks on the barbie. Sue me.

5. Campaign To Promote Print Focuses On Print

The Print Council is going on the offensive. With the assistance of a coalition of eight public relations agencies that have banded together to produce pro bono work, The Print Council is undertaking a campaign to remind content producers of print’s virtues. According to a Pressbox article, the work these eight agencies will perform includes writing press releases and backgrounders. One will also provide advertising services.

It’s amusing to think of a campaign to support print resulting in a bunch of articles appearing in newspapers. It could be that one or more of the agencies involved plans to go beyond press releases and backgrounders and tap into the Net, but the brief item makes no suggestion that the agencies plan to pitch bloggers or other online channels.

I’m delighted to see The Print Council make this move. Print continues to be an important tool with a number of attributes not available online. It’s portable, for example. You don’t see people taking their laptops to the beach, to bed, or into the bathroom. (Cell phones have found their way into the bathroom, but not computers.) You can make notes in the margin of a printed document. You can put it into a file folder and retrieve in a decade or two. You can push print at an audience; they must pull Web content. People are inclined to actually read rather than scan long tracts of text in print. Most people finding a lengthy article online that they want to read are inclined to print it out, which is why office consumption of paper is up. I don’t think anybody has tried to calculate the number of email messages and web pages that have been printed, but the it must be staggering. So much for the paperless office. Even my 16-year-old daughter, a digital native, scoffs at the idea of reading a novel on a monitor.

Strategic communicators select their tools based on their strengths, and sometimes print emerges as the best tool for a given communication effort. But strategic communicators also recognize that the best communication efforts integrate more than one channel. Without giving it much thought, I can think of several ways to tap into the blogosphere as part of a campaign to heighten awareness of print’s benefits. Based on the article introducing The Print Council’s efforts, it seems that these eight agencies haven’t considered the online avenue. I hope that’s just an oversight in the article. Print rocks, but I would be sad to see this campaign fail because of an inability to comprehend the importance of the Net and the blogosphere as a channel for getting the message out.

6. Posts Count, Not The Number Of Blogs

Interesting note from the Wall Street Journal’s Carl Bialik (by way of Frank Barnako’s Internet Daily) about measuring the growth of blogs. The total number of blogs isn’t a relevant measure, Bialik suggests, since there is wide disagreement about the total number blogs (between 10 and 32 million). With new blogs being started and bloggers abandoning existing blogs, it’s a moving target at best.

Easier to track -— and more pertinent -—is the total number of blog posts contributed each day. According to Barnako, “That’s an indication of activity and life. Technorati says it tracks as many as 900,000 postings a day, while Blog Pulse says it sees about 450,000.”

Where Bialik fails to grasp blogs’ significance is in his insistence that low readership signifies low importance. Readership volume isn’t the point in blogs; the initial Kryptonite bike lock posts, for example, appeared on the blogs of bicycle enthusiasts that did not enjoy large audiences. What they did enjoy was a trust network among those who did read the blogs. Even if the audience for one of thee blogs was fewer than 10, it only took one to write about hit on his or her own blog and link or trackback to the original post in order to begin the rapid penetration of the message until it reached Engadget and then The New York Times.

Those 450,000-900,000 postings each day, then, can have a huge impact, even if they’re posted to blogs with limited visibility. It’s not the volume; it’s the network.

7. Internal Uses Of Blogs

Among the letters Business Week received in response to its cover story on blogging came this one: “What you nail is that blogs have become a killer app for public relations and marketing. But it’s less clear that they are effective for internal communications. For that, the blog format is very much overhyped.”

I’ve been engaged in employee communication for 28 years. When I started as an employee communications representative at ARCO in 1977, we used manual typewriters, a Compugraphics typesetting machine, and our primary communication vehicle was the weekly newspaper, the ARCOspark. I’ve watched all the advances in communication and few are as exciting as blogs.

Not that blogs will replace other forms of communication. As is always the case, this new medium will be additive. The best companies will apply them where they improve communication. But the opportunities for blogs internally are huge, mostly (but not exclusively) as an enhancement to knowledge sharing. Contrary to what some marketers of very expensive knowledge databases would have you believe, knowledge sharing is a person-to-person activity, not a machine-to-person activity. Blogs can facilitate that exchange better than most other tools.

Here’s a list of the uses to which blogs can be put internally. I’m sure there are more I haven’t thought of, but at least it’s a place to start:

Executive blogs -— Intel’s Paul Otellini finds a blog a far better vehicle for conveying his thoughts to employees than a traditional CEO’s column. The commenting feature has turned the vehicle into a dialogue, allowing the CEO to learn as much from employees as employees learn from him. Aside from the CEO, blogs provide business unit leaders with a tool for keeping their staffs up to date and up to speed.

Alerts —- If there’s a trend in internal communications that makes me crazy, it’s the use of e-mail to communicate single news items. An e-mail from the CEO announcing a major initiative looks just the same —- carries the same appearance of importance -— as one announcing that the server will be down for maintenance for two hours on Sunday night. I’d much rather see IT set up a blog to post server announcements. Employees who need to know can subscribe to the RSS feed and stay up to speed. Those who don’t care don’t need that notification to clutter their in-boxes. The same idea would work for personnel announcements (“Please welcome Betty Cliff as the new administrative assistant in the Adelaide, Australia sales office”) and extracurricular activities (employee birthdays, service anniversaries, softball league updates, etc.).

Projects —- One of the best uses of blogs internally is to provide daily updates on projects. Not only would any employee be able to see the status of a project, but the organization maintains a record -— institutional memory —- of exactly what it took to get the project done. Project team members can also benefit from a group blog where they can share information and provide updates without having to hold a time-wasting team meeting.

Individual employee blogs -— If I’ve done some work or learned something other employees might find valuable, I can post it to my blog. Those who find the information I share valuable would read my blog or get my feed; those who didn’t wouldn’t. (The use of an RSS news reader addresses the concern that reading intranet blogs will take too much time. A quick scan of the headlines will help an employee identify useful information.) A Dutch software company where every employee has a blog has led employees to share code they have written, for instance, eliminating the need for another employee to duplicate work or spend hours trying to track down whether such code has been developed.

Departmental —- Who reads department update memos? A departmental blog, though, could be a quick and easy tool for departments to provide updates to the rest of the company on what’s going on with its staff and projects.

Business literacy -— I love the idea of a blog that provides brief updates about customers and competitors in as close to real time as internal communication has ever seen.

Intranets are embracing content management systems. What is a blog, after all, other than a cheap, easy-to-use, lightweight content management system? Add the comments (for dialogue) and trackbacks (for flagging important or popular items), and blogs become powerful tools for internal communications. Perhaps that’s why companies like The Walt Disney Company are embracing them and why they’ll eventually become a standard employee communication tool.

8. Don’t Miss “Writing For The Wired World”

You know you’ve been waiting for it, and it’s here at last! This summer, I’ll be back on the road with my acclaimed (really) workshop, “Writing for the Wired World.” (It’s one of the big reasons I’m so busy in June.)

Since I started teaching this workshop in 1997, I’ve revised it just about every year. This time around, for the first time, I’ve completely overhauled the workshop. It covers everything from the basics to the latest (like writing for different types of corporate blogs). So even if you’ve taken the workshop before, this will be much more than a refresher.

Regardless of the type of writing you do for online media, one thing is certain: People don’t read online the say way they do in print. If your job requires you to produce results from online copy, you can’t afford to miss “Writing for the Wired World.”

Here’s the schedule:

New York, June 13-14
San Antonio, June 16-17
Chicago, June 20-21
Washington DC, July 11-12
Atlanta, July 21-22
San Francisco, July 25-26

Get details at http://www.ragan.com/wired2005

9. Site of the Month

Amidst all the hot air being expended on both sides of the “are-bloggers-journalists” debate, vlogs -— video blogs —- could sneak in under the radar offering a new kind of journalism that manages to elude the controversy.

Rocketboom is my new favorite daily pleasure. A daily three-minute video, Rocketboom includes all the elements of a blog, including comments (which pop up so you can review them while watching the video), archives, and hyperlinks. “Anchor” Amanda Congdon -— a New York-based performer —- handles most of the reporting, although a team of correspondents from across the US pitch in to report on local happenings, such as the Cinco de Mayo celebration in Los Angeles.

Congdon and her team -— along with producer Andrew Baron -— have been at this since October 2004, producing the video Monday through Friday, and they’re obviously having a good time. The videos feature more attitude than you would think could fit in three minutes. Most installments are presented from behind the archetypal anchor desk, some from a location.

Despite the unconventional approach Rocketboom takes to its reporting, it is, nonetheless, reporting. Mainstream TV news reporters most likely would turn their nose up at Rocketboom, but audiences could gravitate toward this kind of offbeat news coverage. In fact, one article about Rocketboom appearing in the Washington Post goes so far as to suggest that Rocketboom could represent the future of TV news.

Web purists decry the notion of vlogs of any kind, arguing that the linear nature of video runs counter to the non-linear character of the Web. The notion is absurd, of course, as broadband adds alternative characteristics to the Web, making it a delivery mechanism for all kinds of media. Non-linear Web pages will continue to thrive, but more and more content that doesn’t fit that mold will be accessible online. We might call this “The Delivery Web,” joining “The Reference Web” (traditional Web pages) and “The Collaborative Web” (blogs, etc.). Podcasting, for example, would fit in the “Delivery Web” category.

Hate linear online content like Rocketboom as they may, these purists will just have to put up with it. Rocketboom boasts about 25,000 daily downloads. (What blogger wouldn’t love to have those kinds of numbers?) Once other vlogger/reporters begin adding their reports to the vlogosphere (I didn’t really just call it that, did I?) you’ll be able to assemble your own daily 30-minute video newscast, leaving The CBS Evening News and its ilk to struggle to find an audience.

Most vlogs (and there aren’t all that many yet) are shot with webcams in home offices and bedrooms, just a talking head speaking what could just as easily have been written in a blog. The production values behind Rocketboom require more effort than most vloggers are likely to want to put into their efforts, but there are probably enough enthusiastic amateur producers out there to create a niche space for Rocketboom-like Web-based programming. If the efforts of Amanda and her crew are any indication of what that will mean, I can’t wait.

Rocketboom: http://www.rocketboom.com

10. HC+T Update

I’m conducting an audit of a communication process for a major international non-profit organization
I’m conducting my “Writing for the Wired World” workshop for several organizations in the months ahead, including NRECA and First Data Corporation
If you’re going to be at the IABC International Conference in Washington DC in June, don’t miss the session Toby Ward and I are conducting on Wednesday morning. I promise, you haven’t seen a conference presentation like it

11. Boilerplate And Subscription Information

You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.

Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!

Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.

For help with this newsletter, send email to mailto:shel@holtz.com.

To submit an item, or to comment, send email to mailto:shel@holtz.com.

Visit Holtz Communication + Technology on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com.

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Posted by Shel on 05/31 at 06:04 PM
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